


Weapons Without Owners

by RubilineRoundabout



Category: Sonic the Hedgehog - All Media Types
Genre: Buckle up, Everyone Has Trauma, M/M, Multi, Post-Apocalypse, Suicidal Ideation, alcohol mention, blatant disregard for grammar in an artsy way, firearm mention, lots of breakdowns, mild gore in chapter 3, mute!Avatar, ooc if youre a square, oops! all trans, pleasantly slow burn that doesnt take forever, self-harm mention if you squint, sonic is a mess, will add more tags with new chapters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-14
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-03-31 08:13:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13970973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RubilineRoundabout/pseuds/RubilineRoundabout
Summary: In the wasteland, a hedgehog walks, undying.In the wasteland, a jackal doubts corporeality in an apocalypse not of his own doing.





	1. exigency

  
He had been walking for a time.  
  
Time doesn't mean anything when you're left with all of it, burdensome, cruel, and back-breaking. There was nothing else but time, so he walked.  
  
Hard cracked ground crumbled, topsoil-turned-sand snares under his boxy, tarnished-gold-and-burnt-plastic shoes, his head neutral ahead, eyes unfocused, face blank. He didn't see, or think. He didn't feel. He walked - empty, ascetic, glassy-eyed.  
  
The sun would set, and he would set up camp. Gloved hands would move, of their own accord, in patterns corresponding to survival. Light a fire of tinder and drift, droplets of water in the skillet, carrots and peas frozen prior soft against the iron sides. He sat and ate.  
  
He laid down back on dirt and slept.  
  
He would wake up the next morning and walk again. The air would be still, and hot, and dry. And it would be suffocating.  
  
Time would suffocate Shadow the Hedgehog. That, or the silence.  
  
He would make camp again as the sun set. He would break open a ration. His brain counted up and down, ratios and sharpnesses, how-many-left to how-many-potential, and exhaustion took hold of him and he laid down and slept, choking on the void between feelings.  
  
He awoke and packed his things. His legs drove him ever forward. The landscape could blur if he ran fast, but he couldn't run. So the landscape blurred as he walked, filling him with the unique vertigo of an ever unchanging world, more vast and unfathomable than he could consume. He didn't have the stomach for it, anyway.  
  
So he walked. And something walked back.

* * *

  
  
Shadow broke his journey by stepping once to the side.  
  
A cool breeze fluttered by his face, left by something moving - close by. He did nothing.  
  
He took one step back. That breeze again, cutting across the front of his chest and the scraps of sun-bleached canvas that he wore as a makeshift robe.  
  
To the side again. His body moved in minimal ways, always catching the breeze so close. His eyes glazed, he stepped forward, then back. He became aware of a thin sound - thickening, until it was a scream, perhaps of rage.  
  
It was not him. Shadow turned his head to find the source, and turned his head back again.  
  
The jackal, roaring with frustration, punched again - empty air, a cool breeze brushing across the hedgehog's half-lidded face. The hedgehog stood in place with some rigidity, the jackal nearly touching him. His breath rolled slow, and steady, and somehow shallow, across the fur of his assailant's arm.  
  
The jackal lowered his arm, quaking in rage. He began to walk forward again, the landscape the same blur as it ever was. The hot cracked dirt underfoot gave way to him, and he moved like a train - deliberately, slowly, but inevitably to the horizon.  
  
The jackal followed him, half of a helmet clinging to his face in defiance of ruin.  
  
\--  
  
The jackal slept far outside of the hedgehog's camp. He tossed on the ground, the ratty threadbare blanket twisting and contorting in strange ways under his unstill body.  
  
He was someone once. Then he wasn't, and then he became someone else. And now he wasn't, but maybe he was. He had punched at the hedgehog to see if he was anything. Results were inconclusive, so he tossed again, nerves crackling, stomach tight and fingers tense-release-tense-release and so he fell asleep.  
  
They woke up at the same time. The hedgehog's hands did what they always did. His stomach was filled. He walked, as always, but now accompanied by a second crunch-crunch-crunch rhythm. He walked, regardless, empty, but something touched him deep inside. Some reminder. Side-step. Duck. Two steps back. A jump at a precise height calculated by a mechanism he could not control. His stomach rumbled. He deserved it.  
  
His hands made dinner after the sun disappeared. His legs carried him to the dirt and he slept. The jackal moved in closer.  
  
They repeated this every day - the hedgehog's inexorable exodus through this waste, his supplies dwindling. The jackal, trailing behind, looking for evidence that he was real.  
  
The hedgehog stopped.  
  
Before him was a flower, nestled in between two crevices in the dirt. A small red flower, with spiked petals, and a yellow center. Its roots struggled for purchase among the dried-out topsoil, but it grew - water was under it.  
  
His hand went to tear the flower out of the soil.  
  
It stopped, his fingers millimetres away from the petals.  
  
His hand dropped, and then his legs, too. He slumped over, on his knees, before the plant, prostrate, as a prayer.  
  
The hedgehog heard that noise again, and felt a stinging moisture come to his eyes. It came from him.  
  
Shadow wailed in rage, tears welling up in his eyes and dripping into the hard earth. He dug his hands, clawed, into the soil and screamed, his grotesque sobs absorbed by the still and hot air around him. His head touched the ground before the flower and he let out another wail, choked with sobs and rage and betrayal and loss and so, so, much more. The hedgehog sat there for a long time, until the tears could come no more, and still he coughed out screams and whimpers, grieving something he could not quite remember.  


* * *

  
  
The jackal watched from afar, understanding, yet not quite.  


* * *

  
  
He made camp that night, and his hands did not make him food by themselves, and it brought him some measure of comfort to look down at the ingredients that he used, at the small pocketknife with which he cut up the carrots and peeled the potatoes, at the skillet which warmed his hands as he spilled a precious few drops of water and a packet of dehydrated stock into it.  
  
He built the fire far away from the flower, but close enough to see it, perpetually, from his vigil at the fire. The jackal, too, made camp close enough to see it, a silhouette against two campfires, casting two long shadows into the night.  
  
The next time the jackal tried to hit him, the hedgehog grabbed his wrist and threw him down with a great violence that he thought he had forgotten.  


* * *

  
  
The jackal awoke in parts, first his exposed eye, and the eye within his mask. His body took longer - a dull ache permeated his muscles and his head throbbed as if it were full of swamp water and blood. He sat up, checking his surroundings. His belongings were in order, in a neat row by his formerly-prone body.  
  
He pushed himself up, legs bent, and as he tried to stand, he yelped, crumpling back down in pain. His teeth gritted in pain, he took a deep breath of dust and air and made a greater effort. His hands splayed out across the ground and he lifted himself slowly to his feet and looked to the west.  
  
He - the hedgehog - was sat by a fire which had long lost its flame - only embers lived in that pile of charred branches. His head was down, and he breathed, unconscious, with the deliberation of a creature who had forgotten what sleep felt like. The jackal peeked over the fire - a skillet, with a meal in it, and an empty slab of hollowed bark with food stains next to Shadow. He had cooked for two.  
  
He was thrown, and so Shadow could interact with him. Logically, he could also interact with Shadow.  
  
Was he real?  
  
Was Shadow?  
  
He took the skillet off of the fire and picked at the vegetables with his fingers - carrots and potatoes in a beef broth. A glint caught his eye, and next to the hedgehog was a tiny pocketknife, stained with carrot fibers and potato starch and tiny bits of peel.  
  
The jackal sighed, and lifted a broth-smothered vegetable to his mouth.  
  
It was coarse, and acrid, and mealy, but filling. It smelled of sulfur, and sadness, and something from before. He hadn't had a meal like it in a long time. He hoped he wouldn't again.  
  
He sat down where he had woken up, covered himself with his old blanket from his pack, and went to sleep, upright, hunched, and then collapsed.

* * *

  
  
Shadow opened his mouth, but just barely. His voice, raspy from disuse and dehydration, faltered. With some great effort, and a hacking cough, he tried again.  
  
"I thought... I was alone."  
  
The jackal looked up, The sun was at its zenith, beating down relentlessly on the pair. They made two sets of footprints in the endless cracked dirt, and the half of the jackal's mask that hung off the straps of his pack made a rhythmic soft metallic ‘paf’ as it hit his torn leggings.  
  
He looked down again. A sound began to form at the back of his throat, but he thought better of it.  


* * *

  
  
"My name is Shadow." the hedgehog said, staring half-lidded into the fire. "I have been out here for a while."  
  
"Infinite is what I called myself." the jackal, too, stared into the fire, a creature without self-preservation, consuming itself for fuel. "I... forgot what I was called before."  
  
He kept looking at the fire, dying down, embers pathetic and smouldering. The trees in this wasteland had all dried out - branches were plentiful and tinder was easy to peel and make. The fire smelled like nothing. The air tasted like ash. They said no more.  


* * *

  
  
The two trudged through the wasteland. Shadow's vestments, browned from heat and sun and dust, crackled in the wind. Infinite's cracked helmet made rhythm.  


* * *

  
  
They came across a patch of checkered green.  
  
Shadow sat down next to it. Among this wasteland, this ruined plain, one square-metre of greenery lived, breathed. A sunbeam kissed it, but fell askew, illuminating the fingertips of Shadow, who dared not touch it.  
  
"This was Green Hill." neither of them said.  
  
Shadow sat, and stared, for hours. His eyes were lidded. He barely breathed.  
  
Hours became days. He hadn't slept. Infinite kept vigil, a violent silhouette against the oppressive flatness of the world around them.  
  
Finally, he got up on limbs poorly-used, and kept walking. Infinite, mouth dry, followed.  


* * *

  
  
They came across a cliff face, steep and impassable. Smoothed by sandy wind, it jutted from the landscape with the assuredness of a mountain, and the reality of a great and tangible thing. It blocked the sun for half of the day, and provided a slipstream for the other half, bathing the two, were they the two now, in cool wind.  
  
Shadow pressed himself against it whenever he could. He would carve a single stroke into it every night, gazing at his hands, wrenching them away from their mundanity. It felt awful to take control - too difficult, too much, too soon.  
  
Infinite walked along it, but never touched it. He followed Shadow, his back becoming a fixture in his landscape, his spines dusty and dull and tired, a great sadness in his eyes. He poured the accumulated dust from his half-helmet, and when nobody was looking, he swept the rest from the other half.  
  
The cruelest thing this place had to offer was the occasional flower, jutting with defiance, from the cliff. Shadow touched each one with a fingertip. Infinite stared at the flowers, filled with an emotion he could not yet identify, and breathed.  
  
Their life was quiet.  


* * *

  
  
They found a ruined home. Its roof had collapsed, burnt out and cracked and charred. Its walls had fallen apart. It would provide no protection. But under the cliff face, they found signs of a life before. Picture frames, with a family that no longer breathed. A chair, worn, dusty, ruined, but which had seen love and trust for decades. A refrigerator, empty of food or cold. And on a windowsill, standing miraculously unharmed, a flowerpot, filled with dry dirt, accompanied by a rusted metal watering can.  
  
Shadow sat in the rotted-out chair and buried his head in his hands. Infinite sat cross-legged in the foyer. Nothing was said. Nothing was done. They had food for a few more days, and water for a few more after.  
  
Shadow rose to his feet and took the flowerpot and watering can. The can, he fastened to his belt, a loose scrap of stapled leather around his waist. The flowerpot, he cradled in the crook of his elbow.  
  
They walked again. When Shadow saw the first flower on the cliffside, he plucked it out of the crack in the rock and planted it in his flowerpot.  


* * *

  
  
Infinite was assaulted by half-remembered dreams, and recursive awakenings, and layered nightmares whose forms he could not grasp, and he cried, silent, in his bedroll.  
  
Shadow watered his plant, and stayed still, and tried to pretend that he was okay again.  


* * *

  
  
Infinite stole glances at Shadow's plant, when he wasn't looking, and treasured them like he treasured restful sleep. It lived as it did in the cliff; strong, resilient, and radiant. It was a red star among a beige land. He admired it. It had not gotten the beige inside of it yet.  


* * *

  
  
Shadow's foot hit metal. They had run out of food the day before, and with the plant, they were verging on running out of water. They hadn't said anything to each other in days. They had simply kept rhythm, and lived, and made sure they knew they were truly there.  
  
Regardless, his foot hit metal. His footsteps brushed away dust over a metal floor. A rusted aperture in the cliff stood stark against the rock, and Shadow ran his fingers over it too. It was shut, two sliding robotic doors controlled through a panel on the side.  
  
Infinite's hand was the one that pressed the button on the panel, and with a whir of machinery that had not seen use in a time, it opened into a well-lit staircase leading down into the cliff.  
  
Shadow stood at the door, looking down.  
  
Infinite, for the first time since the first time Shadow met him, tried to touch him.  
  
Shadow stood, motionless, Infinite's hand lightly touching his shoulder.  
  
"Please... don't touch me."  
  
Infinite's hand withdrew. The jackal tried to say something, but it was caught in his throat.  
  
Shadow took a step down, and looked back up at Infinite. His body, unadorned with cowls, carrying an empty backpack, his back to the bare sunset sun, a perfect circle around his head and chest.  
  
Infinite took a step forward, and his body blotted out the sun as he followed Shadow down. The steel steps clacked against his shoes with each step, a foreign sound to the powder-puff crunch of dust. He descended, with Shadow, and didn't hope.  


* * *

  
  
The bunker was unassuming, yet expansive. It was plainly a safehouse, but its creator knew that no precaution was enough, and built enough into it to sustain the two for a while.  
  
It was the electricity that was the main matter.  
  
Upon inspection, the generator keeping the facility running had seventy-two hours remaining until it plunged the entire complex into darkness. Three days in relative comfort was good enough for Infinite. He found a bed and spent hours sleeping as Shadow found a tap and filled his watering can, and then his waterskin, and then his stomach.  


* * *

  
  
Infinite located the library on the twelfth hour. He gazed at the shelves, stocked with a thousand books, blurring together in volumes and colors and authors and subject matter and - he had to prioritize.  
  
Infinite began searching for books about plant care. He found four: "Proper Care for 200 Common Houseplants,"  "Urban Botanics," "Living with Plants," and "The Complete Gardener's Guide." He tried to find humor in the fact that nobody had written a book about keeping a plant after the end.  
  
He failed.  
  
Shadow was asleep on a clean bed. The plant was on his end table, its petals sharp and radiant. Beside him was his backpack, filled with canned goods and dehydrated produce and bottles and bottles of water.  


* * *

  
  
Shadow considered the gun.  
  
It was a large pistol, all things considered. He had used one like it once, a long time ago - he could chamber a round and shoot one person dead with each bullet in his clip were he to so choose.  
  
But there were no people but him and Infinite, and he wasn't so sure he would choose, so he considered the gun.  
  
Once, he had used this kind of gun to save or condemn living beings. He killed with impunity, breaking their skulls with his compressed buzzsaw body, burning them alive in fire and gasoline, riddling them with bullets until they attracted flies. Humans and his kin alike, all died by his blood-soaked hand.  
  
And in the end, none of it mattered. None of those deaths meant anything in the grandest scheme of things. So, at the cost of hundreds of lives, he had delayed the inevitable for another three years. There was always a new crisis, a new evil, a new creature to ruin. Once, it had been him. It was only a matter of time until failure was inevitable.  
  
So, then, Shadow considered the gun.  


* * *

  
  
Infinite looked at himself in a clean bathroom mirror. His single exposed eye was bloodshot, and his hands trembled as it leaked.  
  
He remembered striking the Phantom Ruby with his blade, so long ago, and seeing this - this wasteland. It was what he had wanted, in his rage, his ingratitude. He had thought he could profit off of others, only to reap the rewards in a world all his own, in a sort of apocalyptic hedonism, a bacchanal of one. He had wished for murder upon everyone weaker than him for his own nihilistic kicks. And worst of all, he had wished that everything else was just gone - every little detail scrubbed from this world - leaving only himself and that cracked, dusty plain, devoid of anything.  
  
A root of something sick and gnarled crawled up from a deep and rotten part of him. It reminded him that he could have been happy had he embraced cruelty. That maybe this was what he really wanted right now - that this world was what he deserved for his strength.  
  
No. He had wanted it a long time ago.  
  
No. He was too weak to prevent himself from wanting it.  
  
No. He was too fucking weak!  
  
His fist smashed into the mirror, fracturing it, and he collapsed, sobbing, on the floor. His hands made claws on the bathroom tile and he pounded them, too, full of blood and froth and rage and so much self-hatred.  
  
And he wailed.  


* * *

  
  
Shadow thought about Maria.  
  
Shadow stopped thinking for a few hours.  


* * *

  
  
Infinite emerged from the bathroom clean and tired and aching, the dust of the wasteland scrubbed from his fur. He would be out there again in two days, but it meant something to him to wash again.  
  
Shadow was laid upon the common room couch, staring at a wall. Infinite, emerging from the doorway, took a careful step towards him.  
  
"Do..."  
  
Shadow turned slowly to him.  
  
"Do you want to play ping-pong?"  
  
"What?" Shadow coughed, surprised. "Ping-pong?"  
  
The deep velveteen of Shadow's voice surprised Infinite. Used to the dusty hack of Shadow in the wasteland, he took a second to collect himself.  
  
"I saw a folded table and paddles in the other room." Infinite shrugged, looking away. "I thought you might like..."  
  
"Okay."  
  
"What? Okay."  


* * *

  
  
They played ping-pong, like normal creatures.  
  
Shadow struck the ball, its spin pushing it to the left as it arced over the small net. Infinite's forehand transitioned swiftly into a backhand as he deflected it with backspin - it hit Shadow's side of the table and it faltered, bouncing in place instead of into Shadow's waiting paddle. Shadow's body leaned forward and he volleyed it over with a simple hit.  
  
Infinite hit the ball back lightly but at a complex angle. Shadow just stood as it bounced once, twice, and off the table, rolling to a stop at his foot. He was concentrated on something else.  
  
"Your hand."  
  
Infinite looked down. He wasn't wearing his black clawed gloves; too bulky, too impersonal. In their place were three long gashes. Impact wounds from the broken mirror, Infinite mused to himself. The mirror must have scratched my hand when I punched it.  
  
"What happened, Infinite?" Shadow asked, a hint of urgency in his voice. "What injured you? Is it unsafe here?" He snapped his head left, then right, scanning for threats.  
  
The jackal put his hands up. "Shadow, I hurt myself." Infinite said cautiously. "It was - I was too weak. I shouldn't have worried you."  
  
Shadow's shoulder's didn't relax at all. "You hurt yourself and you didn't give yourself medical attention." he stated, all sterility and concern, looking at Infinite's hand, which was now bleeding quite heavily. "Do you-"  
  
"I didn't want to worry you!" Infinite cried out, the emotion that had lodged deep in his gut rushing out like the first waters traveling through an unclogged pipe. "I didn't want to be weak in front of you!"  
  
Shadow put his paddle down gently.  
  
"I just- you-... h-" Infinite gave up trying to articulate the phrase he was trying to articulate, and turned his vision to the linoleum floor instead.  
  
A black and red shape filled his vision. Two arms stopped just short of his shoulders, a head closer than he would have thought possible.  
  
"Is this okay." Shadow asked, monotone. "I don't know how to do this, but are you okay if I just-"  
  
"Please..." Infinite choked out, against his better instincts.  
  
The hedgehog wrapped his arms around the jackal, resting his head on his shoulder. "You're my friend, I think, Infinite. I care about you."  
  
Infinite sniffled, but stopped himself. He'd already cried once today. He wasn't a fucking crybaby. So he remained in that position, wrapping his arms around Shadow as well, the cool metal of his mask a welcome buffer between his face and Shadow's.  
  
They stayed like that for a time.  


* * *

  
  
Infinite stared listlessly at his bandaged fist, a spoon clenched tight between his clawed fingers.  
  
In the bunker, he mused, there was no notion of day or night. There was only a countdown, a reminder of the finite time he - they, he reminded himself - had to rest. He lifted a spoon of ravioli to his mouth and chewed.  
  
What did strength matter anymore?  
  
Everyone had lost. There was nobody to fight anymore - nothing to prove. He wanted everyone gone because of this, he slowly realized. Nobody to remind him of his weakness.  
  
Infinite sighed in disgust. In his heart, he held two options.  
  
The first one was to hold that paradigm close to his heart. Strength was crucial. But he needed a new heuristic to determine his strength. Might of the body was a commodity that neither of them had anymore, after all. So that would be willpower, or cruelty, or...  
  
The alternative was to peel away his layers - his insecurities, his angst, his rage, little by little, like a bandage scabbed over and overgrown with nacreous flesh. He would scrub and scrub until he was himself, whoever that was, until strength no longer mattered, until he was comfortable in vulnerability, in weakness.  
  
But perhaps the ability to do that was power of its own. A power of self-actualization... the strength to become someone that it hurts too much to be.  
  
Infinite swallowed hard, the salty ravioli acrid and sour in his mouth.  
  
He preferred Shadow's cooking.  


* * *

  
  
Shadow took inventory to ignore the clock ticking in the back of his mind.  
  
He had stolen a glance at the generator room earlier. Its numbers, red and glowing with the fire of condemnation, perfect in Shadow's mind, ticked down with what he knew was perfect synchronization.  
  
He was the ultimate lifeform, and being infallible was inconvenient, so he pretended by taking inventory again, in case he had missed something.  
  
Two bedrolls, one for himself and one for Infinite, someone who he wouldn't have called a friend long ago.  
  
A cupboard of non-perishable goods and dehydrated meals. Infinite was someone he knew, once. Someone he hurt, terribly, and who came out of it cracked. Cracked, like he was.  
  
A tiny atmospheric water distiller. He had turned it on, earlier, to test it. It made no noise, but had sucked the sweat from his fur and the moisture from the air and had produced a glass of lukewarm water - outside, it might produce enough for the both of them.  
  
His head ached. He had thought about too much, again. His mind was still unaccustomed to thought beyond survival, after so long.  
  
Some better blankets. Warmer, too. The wasteland got cold at night. Shadow could grit his teeth and bear it, but he worried for-  
  
Shadow sat down suddenly. Infinite kept coming up. It was only natural, after all. He was the only breathing thing alive. But it bothered him, how much he thought of him. He had offered Infinite a hug, and cooked for him, and one of Shadow's first conscious actions was to throw him onto the ground with a cruel amount of force, and it was so strange.  
  
Friendship was strange, in this world where the only two people were friends.  
  
Infinite. He worried for Infinite.  
  
A few fresh things, for the first few days, harvested from the small self-sufficient hydroponic garden at the back of the complex. Vegetables, mostly.  
  
A small box filled to the brim with packets of seeds. A few packets of fertilizer. His potted plant, still in its worn-down clay pot. Two surgical masks, fitted for snouts, for when it would get dusty. A bottle of whiskey. And-  
  
That was all.  


* * *

  
  
Infinite sipped clean water from a stoneware cup and thought about the people he had killed a lifetime ago.  


* * *

  
  
Shadow sipped clean water from a stoneware cup and thought about the people he had killed a lifetime ago.  


* * *

  
  
Ten minutes before the facility died, Infinite ran a finger down the right side of his face. His fingertips traced the scar - his scar - a reminder of the time before the time before the time when he was Infinite. His reflection looked back from the fractured bathroom mirror, disjointed, cracked, strained, but clean.  
  
Honest.  


* * *

  
  
Five minutes before the facility died, Shadow was already at the doorframe outside, his long cowls and robes of browned cloth fluttering in the pressure difference between the hot wasteland and the cool bunker. He lit a single cigarette. He had no others.  


* * *

  
  
One minute before the facility died, they walked, as they always had.


	2. apprehension

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The duo walks, and discovers, and revives old hope.

They had been walking for a time.  
  
Well-equipped after their three-day stay in that bunker, they walked in the shadow of the cliff face, twin footsteps trailing into the horizon like dotted-lines on a sheet of paper. The dust blew thick in their eyes and against their faces and stained their hair dull-beige. Shadow's cowls and scarves fluttered in the light breeze. Infinite's half-helm slowly filled with sand. The potted plant bobbed between them, held in the crook of Shadow's elbow.  
  
They talked, rarely. Never about life before - only after.  


* * *

  
  
"Your flower's leaves are turning yellow." Infinite rummaged in the outer pocket of his backpack, pulling out a thin paperback. Shadow's head tilted towards his plant. They were.

He thumbed through the pages with care, holding the cover against the breeze. "Ah-ha, found it." he said, sticking a finger in the fold between pages.  
  
"What's my diagnosis, doctor?" Shadow deadpanned, almost comfortable. And then he realized what he said, and drew in a quick, sharp, breath, and said nothing more.  
  
Infinite flinched as well. His nails dug into his palms, the gloves softening the pain. With a few smooth motions, he slid the book back into its place in his backpack.  
  
They walked in silence.  
  
"...You're overwatering it." Infinite said, finally. That sick tendril of Pride, cardinal, coiled around his lungs.  
  
He swallowed it down with the rest of his bile. "Let it rest."  


* * *

  
  
The cliffside became rockier, more varied. Infinite wasn't counting days, but it had been many. The metal helmet shimmered in the midday heat, hot against the left side of his head. The sun had not yet set behind the top of the cliff.  
  
And then, variance. The cliff staggered, and broke, and a path appeared, upward, and outward. A jagged cut in the face of the cliff, an ascent to the top of the wall.  
  
Shadow's fingertips trailed along the edge of the cliff, his dust-caked gloves gathering the dark brown of the cliff-face’s soft stone surface, and he followed it, stepping onto the incline.  
  
Infinite, as always, followed.  


* * *

  
  
They looked over the side of the cliff, numb, knotted. From their high vantage point, they finally understood. Far, far to the left, the cliff curved outward, imperceptibly, but surely. To the right, too, it ran curved. As they were walking, they thought they had been following a straight path, but each step was at a minuscule angle. They had been following the edge of an impossibly great circle.  
  
This wasn't a plain.  
  
It was a crater.  


* * *

  
  
They walked away from it.  


* * *

  
  
More barren earth.  


* * *

  
  
More barren earth.  


* * *

  
  
Trees, cold and petrified, were more plentiful here. Shadow dug his pocketknife into one, tearing bark and dead flesh from it, as he had done every night, to make a fire.  
  
And then he took an extra - the size of his clenched fist, and as he tended the fire, it sat on the ground far outside the circle of pebbles surrounding the blaze.  
  
Satisfied with his handiwork, Shadow sat down, far enough from the fire to feel its warmth, but not too close, and began to carve.  
  
His eyes, a deep crimson, almost brown in the flickering firelight, were intent, focused. They snapped upward at Infinite, for seconds, first one, then ten. Infinite caught him staring, once, his eyes intently tracing over Infinite's body.  
  
They offered no judgement, just calculation.  
  
Scraps of wood fell past his wrists as he carved, knife's edge pointed outwards, the chunk turned block gaining edges, and faces, and as Infinite read about plants for the tenth time, he peeked over the top to see Shadow's handiwork.  
  
It was rough, and only an outline, and choppy, but there were two pointed ears, and a head with a sharp snout, and a pair of arms, and legs connected still by wood, and it was him. Shadow was carving his image into the wood block, his eyes laser-points on every detail in the wood, his knife moving with care.  
  
Infinite brought the book up. Behind it, tears welled up in his eyes.  


* * *

  
  
Infinite brought it up, eventually. Shadow had been working on that carving for the past few nights.  
  
"I should have asked you." Shadow sighed, looking up at Infinite from his seat near the fire.  
  
"No, it's okay, I just..." Infinite closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. "I've never had someone... uh... depict me."  
  
Shadow's knife paused. "Yeah?"  
  
"I've been thinking about how you look at me when you're-"  
  
"Using you as a reference."  
  
"Yeah. I..." Infinite's voice broke. "I don't know, there's something - you're not sizing me up or anything."  
  
"What?" Shadow put the knife down.  
  
"I don't know! You're looking at me and just looking, not seeing something, not judging or anything!" Infinite threw his hands up in exasperation, the words spilling out of his mouth like water from a brook. "That's weird, right?"  
  
"What? No." Shadow asked, his eyes questioning. "You mean nobody's just... looked at you before?"  
  
"That's weird, I guess? I'm weird. I don't expect you to understand - "  
  
"Infinite, no, I get it." Shadow stood up, straight, facing Infinite. "My first memory was waking up in a pod, to a man who saw me as a tool for mass destruction. I know what it's like to be... seen as just an object, or an obstacle, or an enemy."  
  
Infinite shook a little, stifling some sort of noise.  
  
"I know. But you aren't any of those to me. You're a friend, Infinite. I look at you like that because you're my friend." Shadow said. "I'm sorry if I made you uncomfortable."  
  
Infinite's head hung low, the fire casting shadows across his face. "...you didn't make me uncomfortable, Shadow. I just- I never had a friend."  
  
The tiny voice in Shadow's mind - the spark of hope that had recently been rekindled - spoke in a familiar, sharp voice. It was the voice of an old friend. It said: ‘Fuck, dude, give him a hug.’  
  
So he did.  


* * *

  
  
"How do you know your way around a knife so well?"  
  
Shadow continued detailing the carving  
He drew out a line with the tip of his pocketknife and began to chip away at it, leaving a rough and angular lock of hair in its wake. "I was made knowing."  
  
"For violence." Infinite remarked, sitting down next to Shadow. The flowerpot sat between them, lit by the soft glow of the fire.  
  
"We choose our destiny."  
  
"Do we?"  
  
Shadow looked into the fire, an incomprehensible expression dark on his face. "You're thinking of circumstance."  
  
Infinite contemplated.  
  
"They called me the ultimate mercenary, once." Infinite said, soft against the crackle of the fire.  
  
"Who?" Shadow turned to Infinite.  
  
"Everyone. I don't know." Infinite buried his face in between his knees. "Nobody thought of me as anything else."  
  
"Not when you were a kid?"  
  
Infinite crossed his arms over his head, elbows on knees. "I don't want to talk about that."  
  
Shadow's thoughts approached Maria, and then turned away, and he understood.  
  
"I was a weapon too, once, like this knife. " Shadow raised it to the light, and though it was dirty with dust, it still reflected the firelight, glinting with danger. "But I decided not to fight anymore."  
  
Infinite's voice was muffled against his arm. "Why?"  
  
Shadow thought for a second, the fire reflected in his eyes.  
  
"Nobody was left to wield me."  
  
 

* * *

  
  
They found grass that morning, scraggy and thin and dry, but clinging to life with the tenacity only a desperate creature could have. Infinite toed it, and it crumbled away.  
  
Shadow doubted that there would be much more.  


* * *

  
  
They set up camp between two trees. The atmospheric water distiller whined softly as it slowly filled Shadow's bottle. Infinite sipped sparingly from his own, already filled.  
  
Shadow was hunched over a slab of bark, chopping a rectangle of compressed and preserved carrot-stuff into chunks. Already chopped was the potato-stuff, and the skillet full of water and broth simmered gently on the fire.  
  
Infinite put down his waterskin and took his fractured helm in his hands. The film over the eye had been torn out already - it once glowed red. He ran his hands over the ear as he looked over at Shadow, and Shadow was chopping the carrots, and Shadow -  
  
Shadow, silent, his knife moving with a rhythm only he followed, smiled.  
  
It was the first time he had seen him smile, and Infinite felt something - unquantifiable - deeply repressed - he didn't know what it was.  
  
He pushed it down and swallowed.  


* * *

  
  
Infinite shook as he ate. It was okay. He'd been getting better lately.  


* * *

  
  
Infinite tossed on his bedroll, silent, tormented. He dreamed of killing an army and cackling, and the rush that it brought him - head fever and cruelty and laughter and revenge, and he dreamed of Shadow - first calling him worthless, then extending him mercy. How a man could change - how the world could change a man. He awoke with blood in his mouth and a throbbing headache.  


* * *

  
  
Shadow dreamed about falling down to Earth for the second time, forgetting, remembering. He awoke with bile in his mouth and eyes irritated with tears.  
  


* * *

  
  
They found more grass, and another building. It stood, half-decimated, a shape above the plain.  
  
They walked, because that's what they did.

* * *

  
  
Shadow finished his carving, alone, lit by firelight. Infinite's steady breaths gave rhythm to the crackle of the fire. He slept, quiet, blanket over his face, both pieces of his helmet resting beside his bedroll.  
  
Shadow took a moment to admire his handiwork - a tiny replica of Infinite, stood confident, carrying a backpack, half of his helmet tied to his belt, the other half snug on his head. The wood was ashen, but smooth, and had Shadow some sandpaper, he might have done a better job, but coarse dust did the trick.  
  
He looked at Infinite's prone form. Quietly, he stood up and walked to where Infinite's helmet rested. He put the little sculpture next to the helmet he did not wear, and went to bed.  


* * *

  
  
Shadow held the flowerpot in a hand.  
  
Infinite held the sculpture in a hand.  
  
They looked at each other as they walked.  
  
The midday sun beat upon them, but it was cool, and their spirits were high, and Infinite couldn't help but smile.  
  
Shadow smiled too, a sad little smile, his eyes tired but full of hope.  


* * *

  
  
Infinite stared. On the horizon, a structure stood - real and unscathed and tangible.  


* * *

  
  
They reached it in a day's walk, the sun setting behind it as they approached. It was a house, two stories, broken and beaten but holding together, its ruins bound with wood scrap.  
  
Shadow squinted. The wood was new.  
  
"There may be someone here." Shadow said, his voice low. "Stay on your guard."  
  
Infinite nodded, crouching.  
  
Shadow looked up, through the second story window, and saw it - a furred elbow, against the windowsill.  
  
And Shadow did the unthinkable. He waved.  
  
The elbow shifted, and a hand took its place, and then a whole body as its owner leaned out of the window. It was a fox, orange and white, pale blue eyes wide with surprise and confusion.  
  
"Tails?" Shadow stood up straight. "Tails, is that you?"  
  
Tails disappeared back into the window. The door slammed open, revealing the full body of Miles Prower, twin tails spinning weakly as he sprinted directly at Shadow. Shadow put his flowerpot down gently on the ground.  
  
Tails's shrimpy body connected with Shadow's like a cannonball, and he pressed himself, sobbing, into Shadow's chest.  
  
"I didn't think I'd ever see you again... I thought we were the only three left." Tails sniffled, snot-nosed and teary-eyed. "I thought everyone else had d- di-"  
  
Shadow said nothing, scooping the short fox up and giving him a hug.  
  
Infinite said nothing.  
  
Tails pulled away, wiping his eyes with his arm. He turned his head toward Infinite and stumbled out of Shadow's arms, taking a step back, eyes wide with fear.  
  
"Wh-what's HE doing here?" he said, arm raised, pointing at Infinite. "Isn't he... you know..."  
  
Shadow stepped back, next to Infinite. "He's a friend."  
  
Tails looked between them. Infinite stood stock still, his exposed eye looking down at the ground.  
  
"Don't you remember what he did? He killed thousands! He's a mass murderer!" Tails said, pointing again at him.  
  
Shadow looked incredulously at Tails. "I'm a mass murderer, in case you didn't recall." he said.  
  
"Yeah, but that doesn't count. You were being manipulated by-." Tails stopped. "So it ended up being like that then." The fox heaved a heavy sigh and looked down in shame. "Sorry."  
  
Infinite nodded. "I mean nobody any harm anymore."  
  
Tails sighed again and looked up. "Sorry for that. I keep forgetting that... I guess we all did bad things because of that remorseless - sorry." He smiled shakily and offered a hand to Infinite. "Pals?"  
  
Infinite hesitated for a second.  
  
"Pals." He took Tails's hand.  
  
Tails grinned he turned slightly. One of his tails whipped around and swept Infinite's legs off of the ground. He landed hard on his back.  
  
"That's for the trauma, though. Now we're kinda even." Tails stood over Infinite. He extended a hand.  
  
Infinite took it. "I hope whoever else is left takes it as well as you did."  


* * *

  
  
Knuckles didn't.  
  
Infinite found himself with a meaty fist around his neck, pinned to the cracked tile floor, gasping for air.  
  
"Knuckles, listen to me!" Tails shouted, shaking Knuckles' shoulder. "Do you remember that time Eggman tricked you into trying to kill Sonic?"  
  
Knuckles loosened his grip slightly on Infinite's windpipe, and Infinite took a huge gasp of air, tunnel vision receding, the color bleeding back into the world.  
  
"Which time?" Knuckles wondered aloud. "The time he convinced me Sonic was going to steal the Master Emerald? Or do you mean the time - "  
  
"That's not important! This is what it was, but on, uh, a really really big scale!"  Tails fidgeted with his fingers, visibly fretting.  
  
Knuckles looked down at Infinite, his face clouding with rage. "Yeah, but you can't trick someone into massacring an army!"  
  
"Yes you can! First of all, Shadow is right there, and secondly, do you SEE a Phantom Ruby on him?" Tails pointed at Infinite's bare chest.  
  
"So," Knuckles' grasp relaxed further. "What you're saying is that he got manipulated by Eggman." Knuckles mused. "Huh, okay. I get it."  
  
"To be fair," Infinite gasped, "I was a murderous dick before then, just not a genocidal dick. I... think I got better, though."  
  
Knuckles barked out a laugh and dropped the jackal, who crumpled to the ground. He gasped, his windpipe filling with sweet dusty air. "I get it, you're like Shadow then."  
  
Shadow crossed his arms. "Call me what you like, it doesn't matter now."  
  
Knuckles grabbed Infinite's shoulder and pulled him to his feet. With his other hand, he grabbed a dilapidated dining room chair and deposited him unceremoniously into it. "Well, it's not 'fair,' but I did strangle you within an inch of your life, so I guess the record's clear."  
  
"What's fair?" Infinite asked, still heaving in deep breaths. His head spun, pounding against the metal on his covered half.  
  
"Fair is, I'd kill you." Knuckles said, already looking away. "But I won't."  
  
Infinite leaned back in the chair and blew out a reedy breath.  He was right.  


* * *

  
  
Shadow put his hands on the table.  
  
"You mentioned 'us three,' Tails. Who's the third?"  
  
Tails looked at Knuckles.  
  
Knuckles looked at Tails.  
  
The tension in the room was glue-like.  
  
"...it's Sonic." Tails said, finally.  
  
Shadow stood up.  
  
"I don't recommend you go see him, though. He's doing... bad." Tails nervously ran a hand through the fur on his head, already stained with dust and frazzled.  
  
"I have to see him." Shadow said, taking a step away from the table and looking around. "Where is he?"  
  
Tails looked down. "Upstairs."  
  
Knuckles heaved a deep sigh, his chest practically deflating. "Don't expect anything out of him. He's... coping with it."  
  
Shadow nodded. "I think I know."  
  
Knuckles shook his head. "Whatever lets you sleep at night. I just want him back, man."  
  
Shadow climbed the stairs, each one creaking under his weight.  
  
Infinite sat at the table. Their eyes darted between him and Shadow.  
  
"What."  
  
Silence.  
  
"I hurt Sonic, and Sonic hurt me." Infinite shrugged. "I don't know much, but I don't think I'm very welcome up there, whatever's going on with him."  
  
More silence.

"But I trust Shadow to do whatever it is he's gonna do."  


* * *

  
  
Shadow opened the door to the top bedroom.  
  
It was dusty, a thin layer coating every surface in the room. It floated through the air lazily, catching the light from a golden sunbeam from the only window. A bowl of ramen noodles sat on a table, cold, uneaten, ignored. The room was stifling quiet.  
  
Sonic sat on his bed, legs hanging over the edge, his feet in his shoes. No sun touched him or his bed. His quills were dusty, but it was old, as if he hadn't gone outside in a while. His arms hung limp, exhausted in a way that was deeply familiar.  
  
And his eyes, god, his eyes were dull. Half-lidded, and bloodshot, and gone. There was no hope left anymore.  
  
Sonic the Hedgehog was a broken man waiting to die, and he looked up and what he saw was the reaper.  
  
Sonic breathed out, audibly, crackling. His voice, cracked, rusty from disuse, came out as a dry whisper. There was no edge, no cockiness to his voice.  
  
"What are you waiting for? Kill me."  
  
"No."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"I don't want to kill you."  
  
"Then leave me to die."  
  
Shadow sat down on the floor. "What the fuck happened to you?"  
  
"I lost."  
  
"We all do."  
  
"Not like this."  
  
"Not like this."  
  
They sat in silence.  
  
Shadow pulled out his bottle and offered it to him.  
  
"I don't want your pity."  
  
"It's not pity, idiot."  
  
"What is it?"  
  
"Water."  
  
"Fuck."  
  
He took it and drank until it was empty. "That was a mistake. Now I'll live three days longer. Why did you do that?"  
  
"Because I can't stand seeing you like this."  
  
"Of course you can't. You're the ultimate lifeform. You'd never be able to give up like I did. It's not like you can even die."  
  
"You think you're winning by giving up."  
  
"I don't think I'm losing." His voice slowly gained that edge it did when he was angry - the edge he used when things got violent.  
  
"There's no winning or losing anymore, Sonic. It's just life."  
  
"Not a life worth living."  
  
"To what end? No chili dogs, no big adventures? No world to save?" Shadow stood up, his voice almost-mocking. "No friends?"  
  
"No grass, no birds, no home, nothing but DUST and FAILURE, you _MYOPIC SON OF A BITCH!_ " Sonic roared, moving into action. He leaped from his bed, his feet disturbing dust that had long since made its home between the floorboards. With the force of a man whose dreams had been dashed, whose hope had been snuffed, who had only the driving force of rage to go on fighting for, he drove his fist into Shadow's gut.  
  
In the moment before Shadow was slammed against the wall, he smirked. Everyone had to fight for something. He fought for his own autonomy. If Sonic had lost his hope, maybe he could fight for his own closure.  


* * *

  
  
The house shook, dust billowing up in short clouds, as a muffled roar rang through the air.  
  
Tails' head was in his hands, his elbows on the table. Knuckles clutched the sides of his chair so tight that Infinite could see the wood beginning to splinter. Infinite... sat, quiet. Jackals, after all, have good hearing.  
  
It was funny how some things went. He had fought Sonic, whose modus operandi was teamwork, was friendship, was cooperation. But at the end of the day, with the world torn away, he was the same as him. Sonic the Hedgehog - obsessed with winning, desperate for strength, reaching for an ideal that he would never achieve.  
  
But Shadow could crack that. Shadow, silent, strong, broken in so many ways, but wise.  
  
The house shook again, and outside, there was a thump.  


* * *

  
  
Sonic, the hero, the hopeless, blind with rage, picked up Shadow and barreled through the window, using him as a shield for the subsequent fall.  
  
They hit the ground with a thud, and Shadow wheezed, the air leaving his lungs. Sonic straddled him and punched, again, and again, and again.  
  
Shadow twitched, and with a hand he caught Sonic's fist and twisted, throwing the blue hedgehog off of his body and onto the ground. He struggled back onto his feet, drawing deep breaths to decompress his lungs.  
  
Sonic, spry as always, was on his feet in a second, dashing at Shadow with everything he had.  
  
With one hand, Shadow cast away his makeshift cloak. It floated gently in the air like a great brown jellyfish, unwilling to touch the ground.  
  
Sonic became a buzz-saw, slicing through the air with alacrity the likes of which only Shadow could handle. With a forearm, he protected his face, wincing as Sonic's spines tore through fur, then began to shred at his impossibly-hard black skin.  
  
"Sonic, you fucking fool... you don't have to fight me..." Shadow grunted, gritting his teeth through the pain as the spines began to dig furrows in his skin.  
  
Sonic leapt away, unfolding, landing on one hand, springing back to two feet. "And fight who? Robotnik is fucking dead!"  
  
"And good riddance!" Shadow fell into a defensive posture. "So why are we fighting?"  
  
"Because you won't fucking leave me to DIE!" Sonic leapt at Shadow, aiming a kick at his head.  
  
Shadow grabbed his ankle and began to twist it. Sonic bent his knee just enough for his other foot to catch Shadow on the chin, sending him stumbling back as Sonic springboarded off of him. He reeled, then recovered, breathing heavily. "Why do you deserve to die?"  
  
"Because I killed everything, you bastard!" Sonic pushed off of the ground, arm outstretched, ready to hit Shadow with a supersonic lariat.  
  
Shadow ducked under Sonic's arm and caught his shoulder in his hand, and for the second time in recent memory, threw a creature down with violence that he had forgotten he had the capacity for.  
  
"Ivo killed everything. You just failed to stop him."  
  
Shadow put his foot on Sonic's chest.  
  
"And?" Sonic spat with vitriol Shadow had never seen before. "I'm still responsible."  
  
"You selfish prick. You really think you, one hedgehog, were responsible for the whole world?" Shadow retorted. "You failed, but so did everyone else. So did Tails, and Knuckles. So did Amy, and Blaze, and Silver, and Rouge, and Omega, and Bean, and Mighty, and the rest. Fuck, so did I."  
  
Sonic said nothing, and looked away.  
  
"But you're alive, which is good. Now deal with it, like the rest of us. You have friends who care about you."  
  
Shadow took his foot off of Sonic's ribs and offered him a hand.

Sonic looked away, grimacing.  
  
"Don't be stupid. Take it."  
  
Sonic looked at Shadow's outstretched hand, and then at his own, and then at the house. The house where Tails and Knuckles had dragged him, taken care of him, made sure he was clean and safe and well-fed.  
  
He took Shadow's hand.  
  
The cloak fluttered to the ground.  


* * *

  
  
The door slowly opened, and Shadow stumbled in, bloodied, face bruised, an injured arm, breathing heavily. After him came Sonic, limping in on a twisted ankle, holding his ribs in pain, with a renewed fire in his eyes.  
  
Tails and Knuckles stood up.  
  
"Holy shit, Sonic, are you okay?" Tails looked around frantically for medical supplies. "Shit, shit, where did I put them- " A box was placed into his hand. Infinite, his backpack open, nodded and closed Tails' hand around it.  
  
Knuckles strode up to Shadow and took his injured arm in one hand. "Man, what happened out there?"  
  
"We knocked some sense into each other." Shadow sighed. At that, Sonic let out a genuine chuckle before wincing in pain.  
  
Tails, all nerves and frizz, opened the box and began to unwind a roll of gauze and uncap antibiotics and salves. Infinite looked questioningly toward Shadow, who gave him a noncommittal "I've lived through worse."  
  
At that, Sonic's gaze fell upon Infinite.  
  
A beat.  
  
"You know what? I'm not even gonna ask." he grinned, that spark that Infinite had once seen in him small, but still flickering. "Fuck it, redemption party."  


* * *

  
  
Shadow had known bringing the whiskey along was a good idea.  
  
It had been what Shadow assumed were hours, and after a few rounds and a big pot of hearty stew, they all had the blush of merriment on their faces. The round table that they sat around was large, but low, the glass bottle of whiskey catching sunbeams in its liquid amber. If it weren't for the smell of dust, he'd expect Vector to be there, playing the piano, and the low din of dishes being washed behind a low bar table.  
  
The smile of contentment dropped from him, in bits and pieces. A low pang of longing for before bloomed in his chest. "Excuse me for a moment." he mumbled, pushing back his chair and taking the stairs.  


* * *

  
  
He leaned out of the upstairs window, frame furrowed with quill marks from when Sonic threw him out. He gazed out onto the plains. Cracked dirt, weedy grass, and the sunset, blood-red in the shimmering heat of the waste.  
  
Someone leaned over next to him.  
  
"You alright?" Sonic bumped Shadow's shoulder.  
  
Shadow turned a fraction of a degree toward Sonic. "Aren't you supposed to be drunk?"  
  
Sonic heaved a deep sigh and shrugged. "Chaos energy exposure. Now I can't. No sweat, getting wasted's for chumps."  
  
Shadow turned back to the wasteland.  
  
Sonic did too. Their gazes traced patterns in the soil.  
  
"He's dead."  
  
Sonic made a noise. "What if he's not?"  
  
"I know he is. We both saw him -"  
  
Sonic stayed silent, a dark expression crossing his face.  
  
They breathed, together, for a time.  
  
"I feel like he deserves a funeral, in a way." Shadow trailed off.  
  
Sonic turned to him incredulously. "No, he doesn't."  
  
"Robotnik was my... well, I guess he was my nephew?"  
  
Sonic started to say something, and then stopped. "Wait, how?"  
  
"Gerald made me along with Black Doom, so in a fucked up way, I'm his son, right?"  
  
"Yeah. And then, I guess your sister, whoever she was... had Ivo, so that makes you his..."  
  
"Uncle." Shadow barked a pained laugh. "And yet he manipulated and lied to me more times than I can count. But I still feel this - this obligation to bury him, even if there's no body left."  
  
Sonic nodded. "It's what-"  
  
"Maria would have wanted." they both finished.  
  
They stood in silence for a while. The sun crested the horizon and sunk like a pebble in honey.  
  
"What the fuck happened to us?"  


* * *

  
  
"What's our endgame?" Knuckes stood in the doorframe of what was left of the kitchen. "We're running on food."  
  
"Before we found this house, we just drifted, looking for places to scavenge stuff from." Tails grimly remarked. The expression of finality fit ill on his cherubic face. "It was by luck that we found this place."  
  
Shadow shook his head. "Infinite and I walked away from what's left of Green Hill. We didn't really settle anywhere but a bunker, which is out of power now."  
  
Tails gasped, grasping the side of the table. "There's more than one?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"We've been finding them dotting the landscape - usually with about 24 hours of power after you open the door." Tails said, pulling up a chair and sitting down. His legs kicked at the air as his tails gently bobbed up and down. "I tried to reverse-engineer one of the generator units, but it's all weird old science that even I don't understand. All I know is that it's kinda old - a century, maybe?"  
  
"Wait, wait." Knuckles put a hand up. "What's left of Green Hill?"  
  
Shadow weakly gestured around.  
  
"Fuck, man." Knuckes said. "I figured, but - to be told, I -" He threw his hands up. "I hope Angel Island isn't like this."  
  
"God, I hope so too."  
  
Shadow's eyes were drawn out the window.  
  


* * *

  
  
Infinite and Sonic sat outside on ruined chairs. The wind had picked up today, and Infinite's white locks waved gently in the breeze. Infinite turned the little figurine of himself every which way, feeling the grooves of the masterwork.  
  
"Did you make that?" Sonic suddenly asked.  
  
Infinite shook his head. "No, Shadow did."  
  
Sonic nodded. "Shadow, huh... how's he been?"  
  
Infinite struggled to find the words to explain. "Shadow... he..." He put the figurine down. "I don't know."  
  
"Yeah." Sonic said, tracing a pattern in the dirt with the tip of his foot. "You know, it's kinda funny, almost."  
  
"What is?"  
  
"I figured you would have killed each other." Sonic shrugged. At Infinite's silence, he continued. "He killed your friends, you massacred half of the Resistance's armies..."  
  
Infinite cut Sonic off. "First of all, the Jackal Squad were not my... friends. They were my co-workers. And second..." Infinite's eyes fell to his half-helmet, fractured, broken. "Second, I don't think either of us are the people we used to be."  
  
Sonic leaned back in his chair until it was on two legs. The seat creaked dangerously. "None of us are."  
  
Infinite looked to the horizon for lack of something to look at. "Shadow said something to me, and I'm still trying to figure out what he meant."  
  
"What did he say?"  
  
"He said..." Infinite took a deep breath. "He said that he was a weapon once, but he decided to stop fighting. When I asked him why, he said..."  
  
Sonic's chair pitched forward, the front two legs hitting the ground. A small cloud of dust came up.  
  
"... that there was nobody left to wield him." Sonic finished. "He stopped fighting a while ago, you know."  
  
Infinite shook his head. "I didn't."  
  
"After the whole incident with you and Robotnik and the Phantom Ruby, he just... stopped." Sonic elaborated. "He cut off all contact with GUN and everyone. Stopped acting as an agent of peace or war. When I asked, he just told me that."  
  
"So he just... did nothing?" Infinite asked, leaning forward. "That doesn't sound like him."  
  
"He took up gardening, I think. Took care of Cream, too, while Vanilla was out at work." Sonic heaved a deep sigh. "God, I hope Cream's alive."  
  
"Cream?"  
  
"Teenager about Tails' age, rabbit, shrimpy but tons of moxie. Wanted to go pro in chao breeding." He chuckled lightly, lost in memories. "Her and Tails had a fling for a bit, but they broke up a while ago. Fuck, I hope she's okay out there."  
  
Infinite paused before he asked his next question, trying to phrase it right. "Do you... have anyone else you hope is still out there?"  
  
Sonic took a second and sighed deeply, his lidded eyes filling with sadness. "...Yeah. Yeah, I do. My siblings, and Amy, and Silver, and Blaze, and Honey, and Big, and all of the Chaotix crew, and... so many others."  
  
The wind blew dust across the plains.  
  
"You know..." Infinite started, and then stopped. He took a deep breath. "I think Shadow was right, to stop fighting."  
  
"Hm?"  
  
"I used to be a mercenary, before all of... this. I had a sword back then. I used it to kill. Then, I got the Phantom Ruby, and I became the sword, and I killed, and I killed, and I killed, relentlessly, for a world that I thought I wanted. I watched thousands die, Sonic, and I laughed."  
  
Infinite watched a cloud of dust make its way across the wastes, roiling like a wave on the ocean. "We've all fought in wars, for ideologies... for people. We were all swords in someone's hand. We got to choose who wielded us, but we were still implements of murder. And now, after the end, we're all just weapons without owners."  


* * *

  
  
Tails packed their bags full of food and water, and whatever devices they had for survival, and their creature comforts. There was half a bottle of whiskey left.  


* * *

  
  
They left early in the day, walking away from the crater. If there was anybody watching, they would have beheld a strange sight.  
  
Five creatures, their footsteps muffled by the dusty earth, walked into the horizon, with no apparent goal or destination. Dead trees dotted the earth every so often, their branches leafless, their roots barren, grasping for nutrition that was no longer there.  
  
The blue one hummed a tune, old and unknown in its time. The half-masked one leaned over to the black-red one and said something, and they shared a gentle smile.  
  
Things would be okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the late chapter - pain troubles and such. Chapters on Wednesdays, more or less.
> 
> Oh, while you're here - hi! Leave a kudos if you like whatever this is! Oh, also, comment! It helps my adrenal glands generate dopamine, which is categorically great.


	3. convocation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clouds gather. We think of that as an omen. In the desert, it is a blessing - sweet water, sweet oasis, sweet rest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok new plan. new chapters posted on thursdays
> 
> ALSO!!!! THIS CHAPTER IS WHY THERE'S A GRAPHIC VIOLENCE TAG ON THIS FIC!!!! PROCEED WITH CAUTION!!!

Sonic's dreams came fragmentary, like a broken windowpane.  
  
Flashes of lightning arcing through the air, the smell of flesh and fur burning and the pain, god alive, the pain.  
  
His claws, torn with mechanical force from his bare fingers, growing back at freakish speeds only to do it again. His fingers were scarred, and broken, and mangled and then reset, again, and again.  
  
And his legs. God, he couldn't look down, but he felt it as if it were yesterday. And he saw Robotnik behind the glass, cruel eyes behind his tinted glasses, laughing with sadistic glee like a child unwrapping his Christmas gifts, reveling in blood and blood and so much blood and  
  
Sonic was shaken awake by a yellow blur.  
  
"Sonic!" he heard sound come into focus. Tails' urgent whisper hit his ears like sand and he unclenched the muscles he didn't even know he had clenched.  
  
"Tails..." he croaked, apologetic. He tasted copper and he realized that it was blood - in the throes of his nightmare he must have bitten his bottom lip through.  
  
"You were yelling in your sleep again..." Tails squatted in front of Sonic, curled fetal against the bedroll. “Was it-”  
  
"Nightmares. It was nightmares about the Death Egg." Sonic shuddered, taking a shaky breath. "It was years ago, why is it still- why am I still-"  
  
The dust under him became wet - drop by drop.  


* * *

  
  
Infinite was gently shaken awake by Shadow. He tossed in his blanket, groaning quietly.  
  
"What... is it?" he mumbled, the sleep still in his eyes.  
  
"Shut up and come with me. I need to show you something." Shadow said, voice relaxed but urgent.  
  
Infinite stumbled to his feet and rubbed the crust from both of his eyes. "Show me, then." he muttered.  
  
Shadow took Infinite by the arm and led him outside. "Look."

  
"I don't see anything."  
  
Infinite squinted through bleary eyes as the sun rose, casting purple and orange hues across the sky like ribbons of strange fire. The clear sky, once devoid of all but air, had begun to form clouds, reflecting the sun like cotton candy at a fair.  
  
They sat in silence, in the dust, staring east.  
  
"There's water up there." Shadow said, finally. "The world hasn't died yet. It's going to rain."  
  
A tiny part of Infinite gasped for breath under the crushing weight of hope.  


* * *

  
  
Tails found them watching the tail end of the sunrise, seated next to each other. Clouds, white cotton against pink-turning-blue, hung skyward.  
  
"Clouds..." he said thoughtfully.  
  
"It's going to rain." Infinite said with certainty.  
  
"We should get going, then." Tails clapped his hands once. "If those clouds keep forming, the rain's gonna come down right on us, and we don't have any kind of meaningful shelter."  
  
Shadow stood up and gazed into the distance, towards the clouds. "Which means no fire."  
  
Infinite raised a hand. "But if we go towards the clouds, there's bound to be surface water, right?"  
  
"O-" Tails started to say, and then looked thoughtful. The dust under his feet crunched as he paced, two steps forward, turn, two steps back. He mumbled a few rapid-fire words under his breath, and his fingers were a blur of esoteric calculations.  
  
"Assuming no wind, which is fair, if we hustle, and I mean hustle, we can get to the water source in two days of walking. But that storm might hit us on the way, and-"  
  
"It's a risk we have to take." Infinite interrupted Tails. "If there's water, there might be people around, and if there's people, there might be shelter."  
  
"What if there isn't?" Shadow said. "I have a hard time believing anyone else survived this long at this distance from..."  
  
"We have to try, Shadow. Outrunning that storm isn't going to work, and at the end of the day, we're still basically going in a random direction. But... there's still so much we don’t know- I don't know! " Tails threw his hands into the air and groaned. "I don't feel good about it, but it's our only reasonable option."  
  
Shadow walked back to his bedroll and pulled out another packet - this one dehydrated beef stew. He re-lit the fire, the wood now charred and weak, and began to throw larger branches on it until the flames became hot enough for Infinite to feel the heat lapping at his skin.  


* * *

  
  
Sonic and Knuckles were generally amenable to the suggestion of heading towards the clouds. Sonic's eyes were cloudy with a deep exhaustion, but he put on a smile of determination and pressed on. Shadow's sour expression didn't fade as they walked.  
  
Infinite nudged at Shadow's arm, and they disengaged from the group, walking near but not too close to the trio.  
  
Infinite turned his helmet fragment over in his hands. The metal was hot to the touch, but didn't burn - it was a pleasant kind of heat, resonating through the material like a hearth.  
  
"Listen, are you okay?" He asked.  
  
"Am I ever." Shadow responded dryly. Infinite turned his head to see Shadow smirking humorlessly. It turned something in his stomach. He didn't like it.  
  
"Something's bothering you." Infinite prodded.  
  
Shadow tried to keep his mouth shut with monumental force, but failed. "Infinite, I think this is a… a very, very bad idea. Those clouds could get too heavy and start moving in our direction, and we'd be doomed to freeze in the cold. The trees would be wet for days, so no cooking. If one of you gets sick... we'd have nothing but first aid. You all would starve and die of exposure. Is that a risk you're willing to take?"  
  
"Why are you saying 'you', like you won't get hurt too?"  
  
He spoke slowly, with the surety of a man who'd resigned himself to fate. "I'm the ultimate lifeform. I survived re-entry, and I can survive some cold rain. I don’t know if the rest of you could. In the worst case scenario... you die, and I'm left alive. Then what do I do?"  
  
Infinite remained silent.  
  
They walked longer. The sun stood high, and the dirt was hot, even through their sneakers.  
  
"I'm… touched that you think that highly of me." Infinite finally said.  
  
"I owe you."  
  
Infinite gave him a questioning look, his concealed eye squinting. "Why?"  
  
"You were the difference. Instead of death, you were alive - defiant. Your presence infected me with that life- life I’d all but forgotten as I walked the edge of death. Without that… I'd still be walking alone, without aim or reason." Shadow stared pointedly into the distance. "You're mortal, Infinite. That's what makes you worth living for."  
  
"That's fucked up, Shadow. I know you meant to be touching, but that's really weird."  
  
"No, I mean-" Shadow sighed, deeply. "I would have walked forever, in circles, until either someone found me or the Earth was swallowed by the sun."  
  
He thought carefully about his next words. "You disrupted me. You reminded me that time isn't a single moment, it's a chain - a line. You can't afford to live the same moment forever. You have to keep going, keep living, from second to second. I forgot that I could do that, and you reminded me."  
  
Infinite bowed his head, and they walked.  
  
"I'm so worried." Shadow said, his voice a hoarse whisper. "I don't want to lose you."  
  
Infinite put a hand near Shadow's shoulder - not quite touching, but nearly.  
  
"You couldn't lose me if you tried, Shadow." he offered a faint smile, sad, but with a genuine determination burning behind it, giving off the warmth that only trust could have.  
  
Shadow accepted it. Smiles looked good on Shadow, Infinite noted. He’d have to make sure he did that more.  


* * *

  
  
The clouds were closer on the next day. They were close enough that they would be under them in hours, but they didn't move in the sky. No wind blew them around. The air was still and quiet.  
  
The silence broke with a hum.  
  
Shadow turned to Sonic. "What is that song, anyway?"  
  
Sonic stopped humming. "It's a long story. " he shrugged. "If you've got the time..."  
  
Shadow gestured around. "No other irons in the fire."  
  
Sonic took a deep breath.  


* * *

  
  
Sonic's guitar was out of tune.  
  
His electronic tuner, clipped to the end of his custom-built guitar, flickered between letters as if it was spelling something out. His hands were a blur around the knobs, precise movements and twists stretching and loosening the guitar strings, the steady pulse of notes pouring out of the amplifier, informing him, preparing him. Satisfied, he moved onto the next neck of three.  
  
The air thrummed with the sound of drums being set up, the clattering of metal a percussion to his tuning session, all in time, beat to beat. Behind the drums, a green hedgehog set up their snares, adjusting their heights. Their thin sharp quills fell around their head as they bobbed up and down, arms pumping in their own rhythm as they built the drums around them.  
  
Beside him, a keyboard stood folded out, all elegant and versatile on crossed legs, like the pink hedgehog behind it. Her quills pushed forward in a steady block, dyed electric pink - a home job, but done with the deftness of a professional. Her thin pianist's fingers swept up the keyboard, not quite pressing the keys as much as feeling them out, warm against the heavy plastic.  
  
Sonic unclipped his tuner, satisfied with his work, and stood up from his stool, slipping the strap around his shoulders. He looked up to the clock on the graffitied cafè wall. 2 minutes. People filed in. It was the usual crowd.  
  
The usual crowd was the disenfranchised, the dirty, the poor, the angry, those who had been hurt by Robotnik. Humans and creatures alike - even a few flickies sat atop the shoulders of their larger friends.  
  
An average turnout for their band, all things considered. The barista and manager, a reserved and nervous beaver, gave Sonic a thumbs up and a soft smile. They knew he could handle a crowd.  
  
He looked back at his siblings - Manic, grinning with unrestrained glee, drumsticks in hands, and Sonia, who nodded in polyrhythmic time as her fingers ran imaginary chords over her keyboard. His hand gripped the center fretboard of the guitar, the amplifiers behind him humming with soft feedback.  
  
"Are you ready for this?" he bellowed into the microphone in front of him, face split open in a toothy grin. It was early autumn and he had things to live for.  
  
The crowd went went wild with ecstasy. He raised his fist to the air and closed his eyes.  
  
"This is Sonic Underground!”  
  
They played ten songs in total: three new, six old, and one cover of an old punk mainstay that the crowd sang along to, fast and hard-hitting and quick. The crowd roiled with the energy of their music, high tempo and rage and hope blending together in one cafe, one building in a city perpetually under siege by Robotnik's forces - Metropolis, formerly Grand Metropolis Zone.  
  
It was that night that they made their escape among fire and steel, bullets and beams roaring behind them. They carried their instruments, and as much cash at they could stuff into their dingy backpacks, and little else. The city collapsed around them, but its inhabitants fought back. Over the din of choppers and gunfire, they heard their song - the one that they had played that day, sold on cassette, played through tinny boombox speakers.

It stuck for days as they picked their way past new enemy lines. They passed Knothole, and small towns. They split off, eventually - Manic made their home back in Knothole, and Sonia moved to Studiopolis Zone. But he never forgot that song.

* * *

 

  
"I hum that one because... I guess it's what I think about when I think of hope." Sonic said, his quills bobbing as he walked.  
  
"The song that played while your city fell to ruin?" Shadow scoffed. "Strange choice."  
  
Sonic shook his head, almost disappointed in Shadow’s line of logic. "You don't get it. It was the song that played when people fought back. Despite everything going to hell, someone thought it was important enough to play our song."  
  
Sonic took a deep breath stared out at the clouds. "Maybe they went out hearing it. But at least they never gave up."  
  
Shadow closed his eyes for a brief second.  
  
"Yeah." he said, plainly, his voice thick with a mix of emotions too complex to separate. "I get it."  
  
Sonic smiled. "You still play bass, right?"  
  
Shadow nodded, tugging at his shawl to recenter it on his shoulders.  
  
"I'd love to jam with you someday. Maybe with my siblings, too."  


* * *

  
  
It was Infinite who first noticed that the horizon looked a bit different, as if it was more curved than usual. He mentioned it to Shadow in a hushed whisper, who elbowed Tails. Tails squinted, and reached into his backpack to pull out a pair of thin metal rods, and after laying them out on the ground, announced proudly that they were heading *upwards*.  
  
The clouds hung overhead, darkening, deepening, lowering.  


* * *

  
  
His eyes snapped forward, off the edge of the cliff, down into the valley fed by rivers and streams, nestled within a town of ramshackle homes and improvised fields. It spread out across the floor of the wide canyon, painted in oranges and reds and sandstone.  
  
Infinite’s eyes widened. "Not everyone died."  


Shadow sat down hard on the ground. A cloud of dust billowed out from under him. He exhaled.

 

Infinite squatted down to meet him. “Something up?”

 

“I didn’t expect this.” Shadow’s voice quivered. “I’d already resigned myself to an eternity of walking.”

 

Knuckles had already unspooled a length of rope and held some makeshift pitons from his pack. "Well, I'm not gonna lose this town by taking the long way around." he mumbled, driving a rope-tied piton deep into the earth with a mighty whack of his fist. He threw the remaining coil of rope over the edge, where it unspooled to the ground, landing in a cascade at the bottom. He motioned for Infinite to go first.  
  
With the rope between his gloves, he slid down, his legs reverse-running him backwards. He'd done this kind of thing before, before the end. His sneakers touched soil, and he stood, rocks between him and the town, the fractured helmet segment suddenly heavy on his belt.  
  
They came down one by one, Knuckles taking the rear. With a pull, he tore the woven rope from the piton.  
  
Sonic looked over the town. Figures, indistinct but colorful, walked the beaten dirt paths between homes and fields. An open area with rough wooden benches stood in the middle, and people sat, talking quietly.  
  
There were two buildings that stood relatively unscathed. One was a sandstone chapel, its stained glass long blown out, its roof torn to shreds, but it stood stateful on a small hill overlooking the canyon floor. The other was a small building, made of stucco and brick, which rested easy by the pavilion. The rest were foundations with hastily-constructed canvas walls and ceilings, partially built up of wood and metal.  
  
Sonic gestured to follow and took off running down the hill towards the town.  


* * *

  
  
They were a sight to behold, tired eyes over dark clouds, the five of them trudging into town with packs, stained in dirt. Townspeople stared, and recognized. Some looked at Sonic with sadness, and some with betrayal. Some spotted Infinite and seethed, quietly. It made Infinite churn with guilt.  
  
Shadow's ear twitched, as quiet footsteps stopped, then accelerated into a run. He tensed, and then a shape, bright verdant, moved past him with a speed comparable to only one man, who stood arms-on-hips before he lurched forward, tackled from behind.  
  
"Sonic, you STUPID idiot, I thought you died!" a figure cried, arms wrapped around him. Their green spines, thin and delicate, cascaded down their neck.  
  
"Manic?" Sonic burst out, incredulous. "That you, sib?"  
  
They untangled their lanky arms from his waist. Sonic turned to look at them, rolling his still-sore shoulder. His eyes held questions, green irises shaking just enough to betray his emotions. He tried a smile.  
  
"Still got that jacket, huh?"  
  
"Still got the attitude too." Manic grinned, warm and real. Their necklace, the signature of their band, shone bright around their neck. "Was afraid you... you know."  
  
Sonic thought to say a one-liner, but the time for those had past. His voice softened. "Is Sonia..."  
  
"Sonia's at the town hall - you know, she always had a knack for politics. She runs this whole thing." They shrugged noncommittally before wheeling over on their heel to the other four. "Knuckles, good to see ya. And Tails! How ya doin, kid?"  
  
Tails grinned wide, his eyes bright. "You still owe me an allen wrench!"  
  
"It's been six years since I borrowed it, you little snot!" They laughed, snorting. They bent over a little so that they were at eye level with the shrimpy fox.  
  
"So you WERE counting!" Tails teased. Manic let out a full guffaw, followed by a wheeze. They doubled over into a coughing fit. "Sorry, sorry, still getting used to..." he gestured with an arm at the ground.  
  
Manic turned to the black-and-red hedgehog. "Shadow, right? Heard good about you. Sonic used to write home, you know." They reached out a hand.  
  
Shadow hesitated, his eyes darting to Sonic amd back, and then grasped it. "Good to meet you, Manic."  
  
"I like this guy. Love a good redemption story." Manic flashed him a tired smile and gave him a thumbs up. Their gaze settled onto Infinite, and they scanned him up and down, eyes tearing holes in his body. "Who's this guy?"  
  
"That's Infinite, from... the incident... but he's not a weird terrorist anymore." Sonic said. "He was being manipulated by Robotnik, sort of."

Some cruel part of Infinite wanted to correct Sonic. He knew he was right, but… he bit his tongue and nodded.  
  
"Oh." Manic said. "Redemption arc part two, I guess." They shrugged and blew some air from the corner of their mouth. "Everybody deserves a second shot's my rule. But listen, you be cool, okay? Nobody gets a third."  
  
Sonic put a hand on their shoulder. "Relax, Manic. He's cool."  
  
Manic sighed. "Alright, fine. Just... be careful, alright? There's a lot of real vulnerable people in this town. Wouldn't want Miss Vanilla and her daughter getting caught up in anything… weird."  
  
At that, Shadow perked up, ears at alert. "They're okay?"  
  
"Of course, dude. They were here before I was, actually. They run the gardens out by the edge of town, keep everyone fed."  
  
Shadow let out a breath he didn't know he had been holding and shook his head in disbelief. "Well, I'm glad they made it."  
  
"You know them?" Manic tilted their head.  
  
Shadow smiled with pride, a memory passing through the front of his mind. "I babysat Cream for a while while Vanilla was at work. I taught her math, you know."  
  
"No shit. She's a whiz." Manic nodded slowly. "They live with the cat and the white hedgehog - I think they all know each other or something."  
  
Sonic made a weird strangled noise, and tried to cover it with a cough. "Cat and hedgehog? You mean Blaze and Silver?"  
  
"Yeah, yeah, those two."  
  
Tails leaned towards Sonic. "Why would Blaze be here? Doesn't she..."  
  
"You saw what happened. I don't think her... uh, world, is any better off." he ran a nervous hand through his hair. "But Silver... Silver Silver Silver. Fuck."  
  
Knuckles turned to Shadow. "What's...?"  
  
Shadow shrugged.  
  
Manic stepped back and looked at everyone, studying them with a careful eye. "Let's get you all a place to stay around here." they smiled, worn but content. "I think I know some people."  


* * *

  
  
Sonic ended up in the hands of Manic and Sonia, in their small house by the pavilion and the town hall. It was a cozy place, with tables and chairs made of old crates topped with stained fabrics. Little plants in glass jars hung from ropes suspended between barely-surviving rafters. A makeshift drum kit of trash cans and boxes sat collecting dust in a corner. Sonia's keyboard, old and peeling, sat unpowered beside it. Sonic felt a twinge of shame for not having brought his three-necked guitar.  
  
Tails and Knuckles found some refuge with two people that they had met long, long ago. Honey the Cat, sweet and beautiful and so so fashionable even after the end, and Nack the Weasel, slitted eyes ever careful, old popgun now a shotgun, offered to host them. After all, Fang was a skinnyfat wimp by Honey's standards and they needed some real muscle, and Fang claimed derisively that Honey could use someone as talkative as Tails to keep her motormouth running. Knuckles found some peace working the wood, chopping the dry trees that littered the wasteland. Tails drew blueprints on wood with salvaged charcoal, for storage spaces and silos and irrigation systems, running to and fro from town hall to workshops.  
  
Shadow and Infinite refused to split up. They settled down with a familiar green bird - Jet the Hawk - he recognized them, and after a surprised squawk and a couple of rushed explanations, let them settle in - Babylonian hospitality, he called it. Shadow did odd jobs whenever he could, mostly finding and cutting whatever sparse trees they could find. Infinite worked the gardens.  


* * *

  
  
It was a quiet day. Mist from the lake folded on itself, cool and refreshing against the rage of the midday sun. Shadow rested by the shore.  
  
He thought about Maria, and how badly he'd failed her.  
  
Infinite found him, hours later, staring blankly at his knees. He slung him over his shoulders and brought him home.  
  
Jet barely turned his head from his board, caked with dust and rust and badly scratched. He was buried beak-deep in its circuitry with a screwdriver and a makeshift multimeter, doing 'what Wave would have wanted him to do.'  
  
At least, Infinite considered, laying Shadow out on the couch and draping a blanket over him, they had a roof over their head and the guarantee of a half-decent meal.  


* * *

  
  
Infinite sat on a chair, legs crossed, until Shadow thrashed back to life.  
  
Shadow sat up ram-rod straight, and the old and broken couch under him crackled and squeaked in protest at his sudden movement. His breaths were labored, exhausted, with lungs that had spent hours collecting dust.  
  
Infinite wordlessly proffered a cup of barely-hot coffee. It was bland and instant, ration-packed from a bunker, but Shadow nursed it like medicine.  
  
Infinite's exposed eye met Shadow's, red meeting blue.  
  
"I know." Shadow's lips barely grazed the top of the cup.  
  
"Yeah." Infinite nodded. "You know you can always..."  
  
Shadow set down his coffee on a crate repurposed as a little table. The sunset filtered in through the wood slats of patchwork repairs. Outside, the quiet chatter of small life reminded the world to keep turning.  
  
Shadow hugged Infinite, a slow, anxious embrace. He clung to Infinite tightly, a low sound beginning and ending at the back of his throat, half grateful and half regretful. His hands dug shallow pits into Infinite's back and his cheek rested on warm, living flesh. A single tear formed and dropped in one quick motion.  


* * *

  
  
Shadow and Jet talked a lot.  
  
They'd spoken a little, before. After an occasional local Extreme Gear tournament, or a chance encounter in coffee shops and sports bars, Jet and Shadow would find each other and talk - mostly about Sonic, but sometimes about themselves. They had the air of friendly but sad acquaintances, regretful that they couldn't talk more, but grateful for the space.  
  
Now, they spent long tracts of time silent, buried in their work. Shadow handed him parts torn from old technology and solved matrices on yellowed pad paper with pens that constantly threatened to run dry. Jet handled a soldering iron like a goldfish handling a rifle, but, miraculously, never ruined his own work. He called it Babylonian luck.  
  
They tore old solar panels and batteries from robot husks they found in the plateaus of the canyon - Egg Pawns left to run themselves down and die, the corpses of their 'drivers' bleached by the dust and sun. Pumps from broken atmospheric water generators were sloppily welded to slabs of steel alloy, concealed by woodwork pressed and joined in place. Far to the west, the canyons sloped into the familiar cuts of Rail Canyon Zone and its ruined railways and steel buildings that had survived the test of the apocalypse.

From its sides, a pair of hinges folded out solar panels. Its engine buzzed softly, the air pump thrumming as it filled repurposed canisters and routed air through old but working thrusters. The board itself was carved, wood channels and charcoal, rough hewn and beautiful in its own right.  
  
And it floated, half a meter above the ground, shaky and unstable like a butterfly with a prosthetic wing. Its gravitic drive rattled in its casing under the strain of its own matter.  
  
Jet, eyes lidded, purple bags like bruises under his eyes, smiled wide. "We did it, man."  
  
Jet's smile faded as he watched it fall to left and barely right itself in time to avoid slamming into the wall of their house. "Wave would have thought this was shit, huh?"  
  
Shadow put a hand on his shoulder. "She would have been proud."  
  
Jet nodded. That smile tugged back at the edge of his beak. "Yeah. I think she would have been."  
  
And then he collapsed, exhausted, onto the floor.  


* * *

  
  
Infinite held a pea pod between his fingers as the sun burned at lower third of the sky - not quite sunset, but almost there.  
  
His gloves, once executioner's, came to his elbows. They served well as gardener's gloves. He kneeled in dirt taken from the bottom of the little river-fed lake and contemplated whether the pea pod was ripe.  
  
Not yet. He stood up and came face to face with a lanky violet cat, her eyes burning holes through him. He froze.  
  
She relaxed, and so did he.  
  
"Hm." she remarked, sizing him up. "Didn't take you for a gardener."  
  
"We all have more to us than appearances." he said, turning away. "Did you see anyone water the second east garden today?"  
  
"Not yet." Blaze said.  
  
Infinite bent back down and picked up his rusty watering can. "Thank you." he nodded to her, and began to step away, over the pea plants, towards the potatoes.  
  
"Wait."  
  
He turned back.  
  
"Can we just... talk, for a second?" She looked uncomfortable. "Just as... friends or whatever we are?"  
  
Infinite nodded. He walked back and sat down on the lip of the garden's improvised fence, which were really just logs on their side.  
  
Blaze gestured around. "What happened, out here?"  
  
Infinite looked down at his hands. "What do you mean, out here?"  
  
"Just in general." she clarified, quick on the draw. "I wasn't there for... whatever happened. I was torn from my home by a white light and dropped in the middle of this wasteland, and nobody here will give me a straight answer, and it's hot and everything's weird and I don't know- was it Iblis or something?"  
  
Infinite buried his helmeted forehead in a hand, metal hot on his gloved hand. The wet dirt was cool on the metal. “No. It’s- it's hard to explain.”

“Why?” Blaze prodded.

“It wasn't complicated, but… describing it is really hard. It hurts your head to think about, if you’ve seen it, so I guess most people would just spare themselves the trouble and try to talk around it.” Infinite explained hesitantly.

Blaze sighed. “I’m not… listen, I just need to know. It’s been eating at me non-stop.”

Infinite squatted down and steadied his breath."

“It was Robotnik, again. He had found some kind of new creature - or made one, I'm not so sure. He issued an ultimatum, as usual. Everyone who usually gathered to stop him came to him on his flagship over Green Hill. Sonic, Tails. Amy, I think. The crocodile and the rest. GUN sent backup, too." 

He gestured pathetically. "He televised it." he muttered. "He fucking televised it."  
  
Blaze leaned forward. "And then?"  
  
"Something went wrong. He unleashed that… that object, and... I guess it was supposed to kill Sonic or something." he continued, voice hoarse. "But it was so hungry. It didn't speak, but you'd look at it, even through a screen and it would tell you. It was like... it was like a black hole. I couldn't take my eyes off of it. And he was so close-" he swallowed thickly. He took a second to catch his breath.  
  
"I've killed my share of humans, but when it touched Robotnik... It was like he was rotting alive, like a peach gone bad, but a human. It was the worst thing I'd ever seen. And then it touched the ground, and..."  
  
The dust rolled across the wasteland.  
  
Infinite felt like he was going to throw up.  
  
"I... understand. I'm sorry." Blaze said, voice low. "Now I know why nobody wanted to tell me. It must have been painful to watch the world just end like that."  
  
Infinite nodded.  
  
"I always thought the world would end at the tip of one of his machinations." Infinite said. "Quick and violent and painful, but only for a second. We'd have a few days to make amends, and then everyone would die."  
  
Blaze sat down next to Infinite. "But life goes on."  
  
"God, it does." Infinite's voice quaked. "God, it sure fucking does."  
  
Behind him, the sky began to burn sunset.  


* * *

  
  
Sonia sat on a crate in front of a desk - a larger crate with a long and wide plank on it.  
  
In front of her, strewn out across the table, were sheets of paper - immaculate handwriting - her own - lines of failure.  
  
Names, maybe fifty to a hundred in total. Friends, lovers, relatives, scattered across the wasteland. A box next to each. The unfilled boxes were full of hope. But there were those in red, crossed with a violence that betrayed her rage.  
  
It had been over a month and there were only so many temporary shelters out there. Only so much food outside of this town.  
  
Death surrounded them.  
  
Death tore something from them and ripped it and when you tried to piece it together it fit wrong, all wrong.  
  
Sonia buried her face in her trembling hands and cried for all of them.


	4. healing rains

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rain. Rage. Healing. Regret. Discovery. Understanding. Congruence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't have an excuse for how late this was. Have the longest chapter of this fic yet.

A light rain dusted the town in dew and precious moisture. Shadow looked around at everyone outside, smiling, laughing. Before, he couldn't imagine this many people out in the rain, idle and content. Yet, they revelled in survival, in the sweet blood of the earth, in respite from oppressive heat and harsh wind, soothed and cherished and merciful.    
  
The air was fairground, without the bustle or the food. Many lingered around the gardens, idly chatting, hardly even bothered by their wet clothes and fur.    
  
The gardens were easily large enough to feed fifty, and the town had a reasonable store of shelter rations to supplant the produce while they prepared larger fields, doing without the topsoil of before as best as they could. He could see the fields between two ramshackle houses, the rain coagulating into thick droplets on the leaves of plants, the soil wet and hot with new moisture.    
  
Infinite leaned up against the wall beside Shadow.    
  
"We came so far." Infinite said, matter of fact and final.    
  
"Yeah." Shadow said, eyes soft. His eyes slid toward Infinite. Rain pattered off of his helmet like it would a corrugated aluminum roof. It sounded like Omega in the rain. Shadow closed his eyes.    
  
They stood in silence, letting the rain quietly beat down on them both. Water poured down Shadow's upturned face, and he breathed easy.    
  
Infinite's hand twitched at his side, and he began to raise it sideways, his pinky almost gesturing at Shadow's.    
  
Shadow's right eye snapped open, and moved to look at Infinite, confused.    
  
"Do you- do you wanna hold hands?" Infinite managed to stutter out. He blushed, his fur muting it, but his hand stood barely outstretched towards Shadow. "It's alright if you don't want to."    
  
Shadow took a moment before gingerly picking his hand up and placing it gently  into Infinite's.    
  
"Sure," he whispered, almost drowned out by the rain. "I'd like that."    
  
They had no urgent business. They enjoyed the drizzle.    
  


* * *

  
  
Shadow stirred a pot, metal, over a gridwork electric oven.    
  
The windmill above their house turned steadily, patchwork gears and ropes cranking a repurposed motor-now-generator for the drippings of wind-power that powered their house.    
  
It was a prototype, Tails had told him. From the wires that hung between the rafters, barely wrapped in insulation tape and rubber, to the makeshift rechargeable battery station that hummed softly in their attic, it was comfortingly unfinished.    
  
But, Shadow contemplated as he stirred the pot of vegetable stew, it was recovery. Some piece of his old life had made it back, even as cosmically insignificant as a stovetop. He could make food like he once did.    
  
He didn't know why, but a tear welled up in his eye.    
  
Jet snoozed quietly on the couch, legs crossed, a throw blanket sloppy on his body.    
  
Outside, the wind snaked through the branches of a young acacia. Infinite kneeled by it, inspecting it for signs of rot or dryness. Satisfied with his work, he dusted off his gloves and stood up.    
  
He looked back through the window at Shadow, stirring the pot. An emotion thoroughly unfamiliar to him filled the space between his ribs and his stomach, and he knelt back down to take the blow with some grace. Maybe a few minutes more with the acacia wouldn't hurt.    
  
\--   
  
They served a thick and rich vegetable stew to a congregation of twelve, guests and family alike.    
  
Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles sat in a group. Sonic looked a little worse for wear, but content, in some little way. He made idle chatter with Jet - about salvage and scouting - the three new people they found out in the wastes this week and the ruins of Rail Canyon Zone that Jet had been picking bare.    
  
Vanilla, elegant and kind, wrinkles under her tired eyes, sat clad in a shawl and robe painted white and gold and red. Her old clothes had been ruined, after all, and she was a rabbit of higher fashion. Her daughter, sweet Cream, a teenager now, sat beside her, engrossed in a conversation with Shadow who she had caught mid-ladle.    
  
Manic and Sonia sat beside Sonic. Manic's look never changed, and neither did the hearth in their eyes - their presence was invigorating in an infectious way. Sonia, contrary, looked a mess - all bruised eye-bags and jitters. She gave nervous smiles all around, her magenta quills dull with exhaustion and regret.    
  
Amy Rose, hunched, tired, still shell-shocked with disbelief at the town, sat near Vanilla. Her hammer, rusty and fragmented, leaned on her chair against her lap. She had arrived two days prior, thanks to the guidance of Jet and Sonic. Her eyes were lidded with exhaustion from her long, long trip, but she moved with an abject determination to keep herself together. Inside her, her old optimism burned hot.    
  
Their last guest was Blaze, who apologized for Silver's inability to attend due to migraines, and Infinite swore that across the jury-rigged conjoined table, Sonic crumpled slightly in disappointment. But Blaze sat near Vanilla as well, between Infinite and the two rabbits. Vanilla and Blaze engaged in quiet conversation, mostly about old times. It had been the first time Infinite had seen the usually-reserved cat truly animated in a conversation, but Vanilla exposed an almost-Sonic side of her, all little grins and clever words and kindness.    
Shadow finished ladling the stew into their plates. He set down a loaf of relatively-fresh sour bread - yeast from shelter cultures propagated through tender care and water, the first harvest of common wheat grown from Infinite's little box of seeds.    
  
And they ate, in this too-small house with wiring draped like fairy lights across the rafters and the low hum of improvised electricity and the soft, soft whistle of wasteland wind through the rafters.    
  
It was the best meal that Infinite had ever had.    
  


* * *

  
  
Infinite, done with his gardening for the day, bumped into Jet on his way out. The hawk looked alarmed and guarded at first, and then relaxed, recognizing Infinite. Under his arm, he hauled his old Extreme Gear - refurbished and pieced together with salvage and scrap.    
  
Infinite smiled softly. "Going out to look for people?"    
  
Jet nodded, eyes glued to the stream that fed the lake at the center of town. In his other hand, he held a small compass. "Yeah. I have a feeling that there's someone out there, close."    
  
Infinite raised his visible eyebrow. "Who do you think it is?"    
  
"If I had to guess..." Jet said, hand on chin. "If I had to guess, it would be that bee. The Chaotix member."    
  


* * *

  
  
It wasn't the bee.   
  
Infinite's eyes widened. Jet rode in slowly on his Extreme Gear, the sunset casting oranges onto his green plumage. Behind him, making impressively jaunty time, ran a short red wolf, glasses cracked, headset scratched and stained.   
  
A small grin sat comfortably on their face, and despite their heavy pack, they moved with grace and vigor that few had coming into the town. The wasteland had treated them well; they were a natural survivor. Infinite would know.    
  
Infinite simply stood by the wayside, waiting.   
  
They almost passed him without noticing. From the corner of their eye, they saw the gleam of the helmet and stopped ramrod-straight in the road. The wolf backpedaled almost comically as they wheeled to face Infinite.   
  


They stood face to face. Infinite’s awkward discomfort lay plain on his face. The tension between them was thick as rubber. 

  
"Hello." Infinite finally tried. “It’s… nice to see you well.” 

 

The wolf nodded, shrugging almost noncommittally. They extended a hand gingerly, almost as if they expected Infinite to tear it off.   
  
Infinite carefully took it and shook. The newcomer smiled, bright as day, and gave Infinite a thumbs up. Jet, from behind the newcomer, gave Infinite a confused look. Infinite shot him a ‘later’ look.    
  


* * *

  
  
"What IS their name?" Infinite finally asked Sonic. "You know, the red wolf one, who I... helped you beat me that time. The nonverbal kid."   
  
"Oh, you mean Buddy?" Sonic's hands instinctively made a sign, one hand in front of the other at his chest, palms closing into fists before dropping back to his sides. Understanding dawned on Infinite.   
  
"Yeah." he said. They stood at the shore of the lake, looking out across to to the houses on the other side. "They sign?"   
  
Sonic made an 'eh' gesture. "Sometimes, but they rarely ever do anything that people can't understand." He picked up a flat rock and flung it. Six skips. "You'd be surprised at how much they can communicate with just basic gestures and their face. But they're chatty if you know sign language."   
  
Infinite picked up a rock and skipped it five times. "I wish I hadn't done what I did to them."   
  
Sonic sighed, a deep wrenching sigh that wracked his body. "We all wish we did things differently. I wish I was there to defend my city when it burned down, and you wish you hadn't been a genocidal maniac who slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent lives for Robotnik's cause."   
  
Infinite shuddered. "I wish I hadn't."   
  
Sonic leaned back, searching for another flat rock, fingertips brushing over the rocky beach. "What made you like that, anyway? What made you think everyone was better off dead?"    
  
Infinite closed his eyes. "I had... have... issues. The Phantom Ruby made those issues worse."    
  
Sonic found purchase in a small rounded flat rock. Four skips. "Vague."    
  
Infinite breathed deeply. "You want my life story?"    
  
Sonic didn't say anything.   
  
"Okay, I'll give you my life story." Infinite conceded.    
  
Infinite lay down on the shore, stones against his back. "I grew up poor in Metropolis. Shitty family. Crap school. Got beat a lot by... everyone, really, but my family hurt the worst. I coped however I could - alcohol, sex, drugs. I'd barely consider that being alive."    
  
Infinite continued. "It was about that time that Metropolis got taken over, right? My dad threw his lot in with Robotnik. But I ran away. So I in with a bad crowd. I started out as a courier for discreet packages, but... things went south."    
  
"I started doing worse and worse things for an escape. First I dealt stuff. Then I started beating people up as hired muscle. I got too good for that, so then I started killing. I made a life for myself in blood and steel, and eventually I just stopped caring about ending others. I did anything to keep myself alive, and I made a reputation for it."   
  
He gazed at the sky. "I was led to believe, through my experience, that the world wanted me dead. I needed to cling to life, so I fantasized about killing everything that had made my life the way it had - queens, presidents, cities, civilization. I thought that fate owed me. And then, the Phantom Ruby... "    
  
"It clouded your inhibitions and brought out that fantasy - made it violent reality. Yeah, I get it." Sonic said, kicking a few rocks into the water. "I know how that feels like."    
  
"You do?"    
  
"It was a weird time in my life." Sonic chuckled weakly. "But regardless, I think that your thought process is valid, in a way."   
  
Infinite turned to Sonic, incredulous. "What?"    
  
"Not the murder." Sonic shook his head. "But the trauma... Man, I understand. If I'd suffered like that for years and years, I think I'd want to kill the whole world too. "    
  
They skipped rocks along the glassy surface of the lake until there were no flat rocks in reach.    
  
"I wonder how he dealt with it." Infinite mused.   
  
The word hung on the air and resolved itself into an image: a man, tormented by his past, once an icon of rage, now tired and worn by the millstone of cruelty. His black quills, bouncy and razorlike, unearthly in their texture. His eyes, crimson, tired. His mouth, in the midst of a kind word. His gloves stained at the same time in gallons of blood and the sweat of his redemption.   
  
Sonic let out a surprised bark of a laugh. "Not well!"    
  
Infinite let a tired little chuckle pass. "Not as badly as I."   
  
Sonic nodded. "Not as badly as you."   
  
The lake was still.    
  
"But close." Sonic grinned sadly. "You know, when he got his memory back, the first thing he did was just start murdering humans as revenge? Just, like, army men?"   
  
"Memory?" Questions flooded Infinite's mind.   
  
"Oh." Sonic stopped. "I thought he told you- look, if you want to know his tragic backstory you can ask him. I don't feel comfortable putting words in his mouth."   
  
Infinite nodded. "I suppose I will." He mused for a second. "Thanks for that. I'd prefer to have heard it from the source, I think."   
  
Sonic got to his feet slowly and stretched, his back popping as he bent backwards. "I gotta go. Business to attend to. Gotta be a wingman."    
  
Infinite stood up too, rolling his shoulders back. He brushed small pointed pebbles out of his fur. "Wingman?"    
  
Sonic grinned with glee. "Oh yeah. Blaze and Honey are having their first date tonight. I wanna make sure they have the best night out possible. Say, you wanna help out? I can't really cook anything but chili dogs, and we haven't figured out how to grow soybeans… yet."   
  
Infinite glanced backwards, at their - Shadow's and Jet's and his house. The windows were dark. Shadow was out, and Jet was either asleep on the couch or out as well.    
  
He turned back and shrugged. "I have nothing better to do."    
  


* * *

  
  
They'd salvaged an old VHS player and a human flick, from ages ago. Without the benefit of any sort of review site, they had to guess at what the movie was about.   
  
"Macaulay Culkin?" Infinite squinted. "Isn't that the kid from the books movie? I remember watching it drunk."   
  
"I forgot about that one! The Pagemaster, right?"   
  
"Yeah!" He vigorously nodded. "The Pagemaster. This is Home Alone, though, which I've never seen."   
  
"Neither have I." Sonic ran a finger along the spine of the box, catching the fabric of his glove against a groove where the plastic film had peeled off. "Seems like a fun flick, though."   
  
Infinite was already halfway to the kitchen. "Blaze and Honey aren't gonna be out on their romantic walk for much longer, so decide quick whether we're putting on Home Alone or Gremlins 2 for them." He turned back. "I have a matzoh ball soup to finish up."   
  


* * *

  
  
Shadow awoke next to Infinite. The dawn filtered in through the blinds, and he squinted at Infinite's figure, asleep on the adjacent bedroll a few feet away. Both of his ears were out, but his face was buried beneath the blanket. His mask, both halves, lay on the floor beside him. The light caught motes of dust in the air, ethereal, beautiful.    
  
He rubbed the sleep from his eyes. With a salvaged toothbrush and a dab of baking soda, he brushed his teeth, looking at himself in a large shard of mirror Jet had found half-buried in the dust earlier. He tossed a wayward glance at Infinite again and smiled, despite himself.   
  
It was cool, a morning mist rolling out from lakeside, the sunlight barely peeking over the edge of the valley cascading early pink-lemonades onto the town. He climbed up the side of their house and sat on the roof, feeling the hum of their little generator running as the windmill creaked and swayed in the gentle breeze. His quills picked up the wind and trembled a little.    
  
Sunrise Mirage Zone, he thought. If this were a Zone, that's what he'd call it. But it wasn't.   
  
He held his flowerpot to his chest, the flower rich and red and radiant.    
  


* * *

  
  
Tails sat in the plaza, head in hands, thumbs digging into the indents by the sides of his eyes. Something distinctly bothered him about... something. His mind floated outside of himself.   
  
He looked down at his body, turning his orange arms over. He felt a strange twinge of regret as he thought that - he didn't know why, and as he tried to grasp it, it melted like snow.   
  
Scientifically speaking, he was probably fine. He dug his middle finger into his eye socket, not quite touching the eye but feeling the bone crest his face. Sometimes he wished he was a machine, mechanical and perfect and modular. At least he knew machines.   
  
He saw a flash of pale pink out of the corner of his eye, and a weight beside him as a lithe and athletic figure settled in on the bench, making herself comfortable.    
  
"You alright?" Amy Rose, recent arrival, said. "It's not like you to be all broody."    
  
"I dunno." Tails said. He rested his head on one hand and began to draw idly with his finger on the bench. He breathed. "Is it- We've known each other for years, right?"    
  
"Yeah! Almost twelve now, right?"    
  
"Yeah... can I ask you something? Like, something a bit weird? It's about myself, I swear."    
  
The wind blew softly overhead. "Sure!" Amy flashed a tired smile. "They're still trying to figure out where to put me, so I'm out of work right now." She leaned forward on her hammer, colorful and rust-free but still worn. "So I can be your older sis for a second. ”    
  
"Okay, great." Tails took a deep breath, and then, unexpectedly, let it out. "I-I don't even know what to say?"    
  
He tried to collect his thoughts. He looked up at Amy, barely making eye contact. "Do you ever, just... feel really weird? Like..." he racked his brain for the words. "Like someone photoshopped your face onto someone else's body, but in real life?"    
  
"What?"   
  
"I know, it sounds stupid." Tails struggled defensively. "I just don't- It's like a feeling or something - some kind of disconnectedness from my body, I guess." He ran a hand through the fur on top of his head, his cowlick slipping between his fingers. He looked up. "God, I'm not good at any of this... people stuff. I'm just gonna go." He began to push himself up.    
  
A hand pressed down on his shoulder. "Wait, Tails." Amy's brow was furrowed in worry. "I wanna help."   
  
Tails sighed deeply and sat back down. "You don't ever get like this, do you? Just.. . you have your stuff together."   
  
"My... stuff?"    
  
Tails whistled a breath from between gritted teeth. "Your... I don't know! Your look? Your energy?" He stuck out a hand, gesturing at her. "How people see you? I wish I could, I dunno, be that?"    
  
His hand flopped down pathetically. "It's like you've actualized something that I haven't, and I'm... ugh. I'm jealous, somehow."    
  
Amy leaned backwards and made a half-chuckle noise inside her throat. "Aaaaaah." she said, smiling a little. "I get it. It's dysphoria."    
  
"Dysphoria!" he punched his open palm. "That's the word!"    
  
She caught a leaf between her fingers, small and pale and yellow. The branches of a nearby acacia tree shed their weight. She contemplated it in soft and calm silence, in sharp contrast to the fox who rippled with tension that threatened to tear him apart.    
  
"Do you think you can change something about yourself to solve it?" Amy asked, eyes distant.   
  
The question sunk like a stone in Tails' gut. He thought for a minute.    
  
"I don't think so." He finally said.   
  
Amy shook her head. "I think maybe there is. I know how you feel, and it reminds me of myself from a really long time ago. "   
  
Tails looked up at her. When she didn't elaborate, he cocked his head.    
  
"W-"    
  
"You ever think about gender?" Amy interrupted, eyes trained on the brickwork of the town hall.    
  
"No?" Tails answered, disoriented, confusion swirling in his eyes. "I don't know why I would."    
  
"Maybe you should." Amy remarked. She got up and stretched, her pale arms feminine, but remarkably built, as a gymnast and a lifter. The bones in her back crackled and popped as she stretched. "I'll let you ruminate on that, but... I gotta go."    
  
Tails watched her walk away. He felt the beginnings of a genuine headache snake up his neck and bury its teeth in his parietal lobe.    
  
He'd think about it.    
  


* * *

  
  
Infinite and Shadow held hands around the house. Not often, but sometimes Shadow and Infinite would watch one of the five VHSes that Jet had found out in the wastes, and they would rest, fingers snaked around each other, sometimes loose, sometimes iron-tight.   
  
Or sometimes, as Shadow waited for water to boil in his little metal saucepan, Infinite would sidle up to him and they would stand in silence for a time. Their hands would meet, and their pinkies wrapped around each other. It was an impulse.    
  
They didn't need to say anything.    
  
Shadow smiled, his thumb folding over the back of Infinite's hand, and he felt a vertigo in his chest that was utterly unquantifiable - and uncompartmentalizable.    
  
The flower on their windowsill grew prettier still, and its roots spread through the soil like an old love.    
  


* * *

  
  
There were more check marks than crosses.    
  
Sonia stared down, blankly, at the lists and forms strewn haphazard across her desk.    
  
They were out there. Alive. Ever since Jet had fixed his board, more and more people had found their way to their bastion - people she knew from the Metropolis days, and people who nobody knew. Jet had guided them to her town. Their town.    
  
But there was so much work to be done. Tents that needed to be erected, plans for construction that needed to be made, a plan of how the town -    
  
"Earth to sis?" a sharp voice snapped her back to consciousness. "If you're gonna keep getting lost in thought, I'm gonna have to start selling maps."    
  
Sonia sat up sharply and let go of a breath she didn't know she'd been holding. Her eyes flicked to the green hedgehog and she sank back in her chair, hard and wooden.    
  
"Manic." Sonia breathed. "How are you?"    
  
"How am I?" they quivered with incredulity. They slammed both of their palms on the desk and it whined, unused to the weight. "You haven't eaten in over a day!"   
  
Sonia closed her eyes. Not this again. "I have work to do."   
  
"It's not worth dying for!" Manic leaned forward violently, the makeshift desk creaking under the strain. They grit their teeth in frustration. "You're - you're pathetic in this state! You're fucking wasting away! When's the last time you even stood up-"    
  
"ENOUGH, Manic." Sonia growled, tired and bitter and full of bile. "I don't have time to eat. I have a town to organize."   
  
Manic sputtered for words. None found their way to their mouth. They heaved a sigh of frustration and spun on their heel. They made it to the doorway and stopped, turning half-around. "Fine. Die, then. I made soup, it's in the lobby, if you reconsider your suicidal workaholic tendencies."    
  
Sonia waved them off with a weak gesture of her hand. Despite herself, her stomach grumbled, and she clenched her abdomen.    
Not now.    
  
A sleeping bag in the corner sat unused, gathering dust as the rings under her eyes gathered deep purple. 

* * *

  
  
In the afternoon, a fox sat outside of a tent on the outskirts of town and waited for Amy Rose.    
  
The dust from the ground billowed around his sneakers, dirty and beige and omnipresent. The trees out here did little to transmute the dirt into topsoil - the few inches left of the stuff crumbled easily.    
  
It was odd. Nobody had really thought about topsoil before now, aside from farmers and scientists. But since it had all ended, it was on his mind a lot.   
  
Someone had once said: "Despite our technological advancements, we owe it all to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains." Well, it hardly rained outside of the valley anymore, and it was a stretch to call what was left "topsoil."   
  
Maybe if it hadn't done what it did, the world would have been okay. He'd fantasized, a few times, against his own better judgment, what it would have been like if the world hadn't lost that day. Maybe Sonic would have killed it then and there before it had time to drink the planet clean.    
  
In that timeline, they'd be sitting and laughing in a cafe in Station Square - the two of them. Sonic would have his usual - espresso, cream, no sugar. Tails had a harder time imagining himself in that space. He'd have a sweet black tea, he thought. But he could never grasp that feeling of disjointness, as if his self-image was foreign - his ideal actualization blocked by confusion.   
  
Maybe his ideal actualization was outside of the box. He thought about gender, like Amy said. It felt like something had shifted, like the box around his future had begun to unravel - but it had stopped, abruptly.    
  
He brought himself back to reality as another headache began to set in.    
  
Well. That's why he was waiting.    
  
So he did.    
  
\--   
  
Honey and Blaze walked hand in hand through town, their arms intertwined, a light blush on Blaze's face - vulnerable and alive. Infinite, from the gardens, gave a half-visible grin and wave. They both waved back.   
  
The town was full of a new energy - healing, growing, renewing. From a nearby plot of garden, Buddy looked over the town, the lake sparkling in the morning sun, and they were at peace.    
  
\--   
  
His axe buried itself in the flesh of a tree.    
  
Little patches of life still remained here and there - these trees were evidence enough. Jet had found a small forest a few miles south of town. The trees clung to life as desperately as they could, their roots sucking up whatever nutrients still remained in the loose soil.     
  
Calling it a forest was too much, Shadow decided, taking another swing at the tree. These trees were hardly alive anymore. He felt a seed of pity unfurling in his gut and swallowed, hoping to drown it.   
  
Thankfully, these trees grew back fast - almost as fast as trees grew before the end. He could expect another young oak before the fortnight was up.    
  
The feeling at the pit of his stomach congealed further until it calcified into a jealous flower. These trees - this grove - held the same old magic that the rest of the world once had - the same magic that made Green Hill verdant and lush, the same that, even in the outer atmosphere, let beings like Sonic survive.   
  
These trees still held that old magic, and it filled him with jealous rage. More magic than Sonic, whose legs did him only slightly better than the rest. More magic than Tails, his little tails barely able to propel him forwards, much less up. It was unfair to them. Why did these trees, pathetic, almost lifeless, deserve better?"   
  
But not him. Not him. He was alien- monstrous, consigned to live eternal in a cycle of regenerating and renewing flesh. A living cancer. Why did he deserve better? Like the trees, he had failed to be punished for his failure.    
  
Shadow's grip tightened around the axe. His knuckles, raw and bony and alien beneath his gloves, sung a chord of rage and he swung, his shoulder a fulcrum, his monstrous strength a motor. The axe split the tree in half. Corded muscles, myelin, vitriol, foam and blood.    
  
He stood, shoulders quaking in rage. His teeth gnashed together, snagging a sheet of the inner lining of his mouth, tearing it. He bled for seconds before the wound knit back up and he tore it again, to no avail.   
  
He took short, shallow breaths, squeezing the hilt of the axe. His breaths deepened. His eyes refocused. His hands trembled. Where there was once rage and jealousy was a cold and fibrous feeling. He knew it by name, and it was himself - he hated himself.   
  
Was this how he coped? He looked back at his hands, gloves spackled with chips of wood. Would he become a weapon, a tool of vengeance again? Even enacting his malcontent revenge against a tree made him nauseous. Misplaced, indirect, cruel. He'd vowed never to strike in anger again. Was he so weak as to break that vow in a pathetic fit of inadequacy?   
  
He dropped the axe. He was done with it for today. He couldn't stomach... this. Not in this state, not in this mood.   
  
He felt vile. Pathetic. How Sonic had felt, sitting half-dead in that bedroom, without closure, without resolution, without a clear picture of himself. He thought he had a firm grasp on himself - he was delusional to think so. He had just been hiding.    
  
But he had someone to live for. He remembered the glint of his helmet, the soft breeze from the punches that his body had avoided. The tickle of his breath when they stood next to each other, walking through the wasteland on a still day. The warmth of his hand. The shape of his jaw. The way his voice broke in concern when he was worried for Shadow, and the practiced coolness with which he spoke when he pushed down his own bloodlust. The space he took in a room. The wound in him, and the man surrounding it.   
  
He had to be stable for Infinite. He had to be stable for Infinite.    
  
Shadow waited until his breath was steady before approaching the the felled tree. So much was gone. The wood was rough against his fingertips.    
  
Shadow heaved the log over his shoulder, comically small compared to the thick trunk. With a small grunt, he stood straight and began to walk back to Jet's board, the sled trailing behind already loaded with other logs.    
  
From across the grove, Knuckles looked on, his own axe loose in his hand. He watched Shadow stumble and regain his footing and shook his head. Shadow's axe, cast aside, glinted in the afternoon sun.    
  


* * *

  
  
Spotting her in the distance, walking back from the lake, Tails stood up and waved.    
  
Amy approached, smiling. "Did you consider it?"    
  
Tails nodded slowly, choosing his words carefully. "I did. I don't know if there's some kind of quantifiable metric for knowing, but I think I'm on there? On gender stuff?"    
  
Amy groaned and pulled her hand down her face. A smile peeked out behind her palm. "Oh my GOD it's so obvious. Get in here."    
  


* * *

  
  
Tails stood in the tent, flaps closed, wearing one of Amy's old dresses. His hair was down, the little tuft slicked down to cover his soft brow. His lashes were already long, Amy had said, so no need for mascara, but she had applied a little bit of eyeliner.    
  
He looked in the mirror.    
  
He saw a girl. He moved, and so did she. He made a face in the mirror. She did, too - the same face. It was unlike looking into a mirror - it didn't seem... off, or weird, like it always had. It felt natural. He looked at her and his brain registered it as herself - or himself. His head throbbed.    
  
"I..." Tails trailed off. His tails waved behind him, and so did the girl's. He looked at Amy. "What is this? Is this how people are supposed to feel when looking in mirrors?"    
  
Amy grinned, wide and full of joy. "Has it clicked yet?"    
  
He looked back in the mirror.    
  
So did she.    
  
"I... think so? I think so." Tails said. He instinctively adjusted the waistline of the skirt a little higher, the flare only a little above his knees, but it accentuated his waistline a little better. "I- I know other people can be- but- can I really...?"    
  
"Of course." she said, hands clasped in anticipation.    
  
He looked for another moment in the mirror. It felt... right. It felt natural.    
  
"Is this it?" Tails sat down hard on the ground. "Is that what this is? Am I trans?"   
  
It felt right on her tongue. She closed her eyes, and opened them to her reflection in the mirror.    
  
"I can be a trans girl." she said, a hundred fragmentary emotions and events shifting in her head as if a new microscope had thrown them into biting focus.    
  
"Dang." she whispered. "I'm trans."    
  
"You did it!" Amy Rose clapped softly. "Welcome to the club!"    
  
"Thanks, I guess." Tails said, looking at her palms. She looked up from her hands. "Wait, what club?"   
  
Amy sputtered. "What club? You know, the one, right?"    
  
"What?"    
  
Amy squinted at the woman sitting on the floor. "Jeez, Tails, really? Half your closest friends are transgender, you dummy."    
  
"What?" Tails repeated, more urgently.    
  
"Sonic is trans! I'm trans!" Amy said, her voice growing more exasperated by the second. "Did you not pick that up at all?"    
  
"No?" Tails squeaked. A worry that had half-formed in her mind popped like an underwater bubble. "Sonic is trans?"    
  
"That man transitioned way after you started hanging out with him and you didn't even notice?" Amy could barely contain herself. "I figured you'd have asked, or something!"   
  
Tails picked herself up from the ground and smoothed out the skirt, her head spinning. "In my defense, I was, what, 7?"    
  
A thought suddenly and sharply occurred to her, and she started abruptly. "Wait, is that why you changed your name from Rosie to Amy Rose?"    
  
Amy gave him a deadpan look, almost disappointed, but a smile tugged insistently at the corners of her mouth. "Yeah?"    
  
Tails buried her face in the canvas of the tent. "How did I never put it together?" she groaned, muffled against the siding of the tent.    
  
Amy, despite her efforts, let out a snort, and then a giggle. Tails, her face still in the canvas side of the tent, shook slightly, biting her tongue as a chuckle escaped her.    
  
Amy's facade broke first. She burst into uproarious laughter. Tails quivered for a moment, before she snorted and gave in, succumbing to the moment of mirth.    
  
Amy wiped a tear from her eye, gasping for breath. "You saw both of us transition and you never even noticed!" she crowed, bursting back into peals of laughter. Tails' fists banged on the dusty ground as she doubled over, cackling.   
  
After a few minutes, they caught their breaths, their giggles abating until they simply sat, filled with light and understanding. The bulb in Amy's little portable lantern filled the tent with a flickering soft glow.   
  
They shared a few breaths. Tails felt clear-headed and light. Thoughts began to run through her head again - like a retouched circuit board turning back on, or a computer fan whirring to life after a good cleaning.    
  
It had weighed heavily on her. But now, the weight was gone, and she felt like she could fly again - if she were able to fly, that is. Designs ran through her mind like oil skittering across a hot pan. There were so many things to do - she was at full capacity again.    
  
She pushed all of that aside for later consideration. Not now. For now, she just enjoyed sitting with Amy, in silent gratitude.    
  
"You know, Sonic gave me his old clothes. I think it would be right to give some of them to you." Amy mused.    
  
Tails' eyes lit up. "Really?"   
  
"Yeah, really." Amy smiled. "You're his best friend, I think it would only be fair."    
  


* * *

  
  
Infinite saw Shadow sitting on the couch, a shot-sized stone cup of whiskey in hand.    
  
It alarmed him. Shadow sat in the armchair, usually, letting Infinite sprawl across the couch like a strange and gangly spider. And Shadow didn't make a habit of drinking.    
  
Infinite glanced at Shadow from the side of his eye. He remained unchanging. Infinite lowered himself slowly and carefully onto the couch.    
  
He moved suddenly, raising the cup and taking a sip in one smooth motion before returning to his previous position.   
  
Infinite opened his mouth.    
  
Infinite closed his mouth.    
  
"Of course I'm not okay." Shadow said abruptly. Infinite turned to look at the hedgehog in incredulity.    
  
"It's obvious. What's wrong?" Infinite asked. "Episode of..."    
  
Shadow shook his head and stayed silent.    
  
Infinite kept looking at him.    
  
Shadow exhaled, deeply. "Am I doing well?"   
  
"I think so." Infinite's hand slid an inch closer to Shadow's and he grabbed it, their fingers intertwining. "You're good to me."    
  
"But not as good as I could be." Shadow whispered, hoarse. "So much baggage. So much rage. I can't even accept who I am. Why do you stick around?"   
  
Infinite had to restrain himself from scoffing. "You think I'd think less of you for being 'damaged goods?'"    
  
"Don't say it like that, it sounds stupid."    
  
"Because it is." Infinite squeezed his hand. "Shadow, we're all fucked up. But we're stronger together. Having a weird brain and trauma doesn't make you weak."   
  
"Then what does?" Shadow sat and sipped from his cup. Only a tiny swirl of amber remained at the bottom.    
  
Infinite paused for a long time before answering. "I think it's giving up." Infinite said, eyes lidded in thought. "I think it's just resigning yourself to being alone, and sad, and fucked up. At the end of the day, it's not about how many suns you can throw at the planet. It's about the people you surround yourself with."   
  
Shadow said nothing.    
  
Infinite continued. "I think I get why Buddy managed to bring me down, back then. It was because I was a sad and shitty loner who revelled in violence to escape my trauma. But Buddy worked through the trauma and healed with Sonic's help. I was weak, and they were strong. I regressed, and isolated, and rejected the world to substitute my own. They forged ahead and became kinder, and braver, and strong."    
  
"Am I weak?" Shadow swirled the dregs of whiskey in the bottom of his cup.    
  
"No." Infinite barely had to think about it. "If you were, we wouldn't be here."    
  
"But I don't... do anything. About my drama." Shadow said, still listlessly turning the cup. His voice came out broken in the tiniest ways - ways only Infinite could hear. Ways only he could feel.    
  
"I go out. I chop trees. I come home. I make dinner. I go to sleep." he continued, his voice cracking. "In between, I sit in my nice chair and mull over my inadequacies, and sometimes I go out and talk to Sonic for a bit." He finally lifted the cup to his lips and finished the whiskey. "I don't take walks. I don't go scouting with Jet. I don't go to get-togethers. I don't talk about my feelings. I - I just sit in my big damn chair and pretend to have my life together."   
  
Infinite heaved a deep sigh. "You don't get it, do you? If you were weak - if you deserved to hate yourself - we wouldn't be talking about this. You would just be in your chair, stewing in your emotion turmoil, refusing to talk to anybody."    
  
The jackal gave a half-smile. "But you're not. You're talking to me. It might not mean much coming from me, but..." Infinite's eyes were soft. "...I'm so damn proud of you, Shadow. You're worth everything to me."    
  
They sat in silence for a long while. The air was broken by a choked sob, raw and unfiltered and foreign.    
  
Shadow fell into Infinite's arms, slow thick tears forming at the corners of his eyes. He gasped for air as he pressed his face into Infinite's shoulders - his face a collision of emotions, his body tired and weak and flooded with uncorked sadness. He wailed, his fingers digging into Infinite's back, holding him like a vice.    
  
Infinite tried to restrain his own sobs. He whimpered, quietly, holding onto the hedgehog with a fraction of the force. His helmet felt warm and hard and heavy on his head, and a tear rolled down his cheek - the one exposed eye.    
  
Shadow's crying subsided little by little, minute by minute, blending from wails to sobs, to coughs, to sniffles. He loosened up on Infinite but left his head on his shoulder - helmet-clad.    
  
He felt his hands move off of his back, and he the metal shift and rise before his cheek touched fur - real fur.    
  
He looked up at Infinite, who held his helmet in his hands. His eyes were mismatched - heterochromatic, beautiful, kind eyes, scarred. His left eye, once covered by that helmet, looked into his, and he slowly realized that he'd never seen Infinite fully without the mask, not since he'd left him to die so long ago.    
  
Now a different man looked back at him - where there once was rage and resentment now rested hope and acceptance, regret and peace. He gave Shadow a smile, crooked and lopsided out of habit. Shadow buried his face back into Infinite's shoulder.    
  
"I'm so sorry, Infinite." he whispered, hoarse and cracked.    
  
Infinite stroked his back with a gentle hand. "I forgive you." he murmured into Shadow's ear.    
  


* * *

  
  
A wistful smile tugged at the side of Shadow's face as he rested in his creaky armchair.   
  
Infinite lay sprawled on the couch, caked in sweat and dust and the heat of a day's work. His helmet, ever-present, ever-stained, gleamed in the sunset hues that left trails as they moved honey-like from between the slats of the window blinds - except it rested beside him. The sunlight played across the left side of his face, liberated for Shadow and Shadow only.    
  
A weight, held up by some rope in his heart, slowly lowered to the ground as the hands that held it relaxed their grip. It was a weight that he had held for years and years - a deep and permeating sadness that sat tumescent in every cruel and wretched cell in his body.   
  
And it had finally dropped, like a cracked branch finally splitting from its tree and falling into the pond below. He didn't need to carry that weight alone anymore.   
  
He was doing okay.    
  
He slipped off his gloves and unfastened the power inhibitors that so badly chafed his wrists and ankles. Satisfied, he settled back into his chair, gloves back on. His flower sat beside him, red and beautiful.    
  


* * *

  
"You hear Tails came out as a trans girl?" Infinite mentioned idly to Buddy, kneeling in the soil. The morning sun cast a pale violet light on the farmland. He felt the stem of a potato, strong and supple. "I'm happy for her."    
  
'Never took you for the accepting type.' they signed, a teasing expressing flitting across their face. They kneeled beside him and ran a finger over a leaf. 'This garden seems healthy. We did well.'    
  
"How long until harvest?"    
  
'Next month.' they spun a horizontal finger adjacent to a single raised vertical digit.    
  
The two looked to the next plot. Green onions. Fickle plants.    
  
"Buddy, you know, I'm trans too?" Infinite finally said, instinctually speaking half-in-sign.   
  
'Okay, cool.' they signed in return, shrugging simultaneously. 'Likewise. You knew that.'    
  
They seemed lost in thought. 'Funny that the trans people end up being the survivors.'    
  
Infinite nodded, deep in thought. "Yeah?"    
  
'Yeah.'    
  
The two of them, once enemies, once again turned their attention to the green onions.    
  
'We need to water those more.' Buddy remarked, squinting through their cracked lenses. 'Too pale.'    
  
Infinite picked up the rusted watering can that he had borrowed from Shadow and followed. It brimmed with water - fresh, clean, cold.    
  


* * *

  
  
Jet found others. Bunnie Rabbot, her cybernetics torn up and sparking, eyes downcast and miserable, as if she'd seen death incarnate. Vector, a mountain of green scales and teeth, unusually serious, unusually sharp. Mighty, clad in salvaged shawls and cloth, shivering and afraid and relieved to find peace and shelter. All of them were tired and dirty and surprised to find the town, rising like a hand from the valley.   
  
Shadow hauled wood almost effortlessly  alongside Knuckles. They chopped and seeded and chopped again, quick-growing trees to the ax. Shadow harvested with kindness and purpose, a tool to his rage no longer. As more people joined their town, more hands joined theirs.    
  
Infinite kneeled and sowed plants and tilled dirt, and came home every night tired but satisfied. Tails, with her critical eye, oversaw irrigation construction as the fields flourished outwards, while Buddy tended to the crops with a scarily natural green thumb - it was like the plants sang when they touched them. Cover crops flourished - they dumped their waste in the fields and they worked to revitalize the land that was taken from them.    
  
Sonic worked with Manic and Sonia on construction and urban planning. People had to live somewhere, and as homes reached capacity, tents became foundations, and foundations became houses. Almost everyone put time into building homes for those who didn't have any. In his free time, he scavenged alongside Jet - out of everyone, he could run the quickest even without the old magic.    
  
The town flourished, and the inhabitants toiled tirelessly to plant their flag of defiance in this new inhospitable world, but it was worth it to see the town fold outwards, swallowing the hostile wastes and making them home once again.    
  
It took nine months before the houses were done. The little settlement became a town in its own right - and when Sonia came around, half-asleep on her feet, asking for name suggestions, Shadow was ready.    
  
It was Sunrise Mirage Zone, and Honey and Blaze painted it on the little wood-and-rebar sign near the mouth of the town. They grew food, and built homes, and built the beginnings of a power grid, supplied by a few windmills on the roofs of homes and along the walls of the canyon.    
  
The town was quiet, still. The end wasn't far behind them, and, Infinite mused, nobody had recovered yet. He and Shadow spent their evenings in each others company, the silence between them full and rich and hopeful as they rested and worked on their personal projects. Jet would poke his head in occasionally, a welcome respite, his sharp wit a relief.    
  
Nothing was better, they both thought, than the feeling of holding their other's hand, feeling the warmth of his palm against his.   
  
Infinite, whose smile was rare, once, and his face still unaccustomed to a genuine expression of peace, felt a surge in his stomach - he'd figured it out, watching Honey and Blaze become the town's doe-eyed token couple, watching Sonic try and act cool for Silver's attention, watching Tails accept herself as she finally understood the person she was meant to be.    
  
It was love. Fuck, it was love.    
  
He was in love with Shadow, and it was beautiful, and the garden he had so carefully cultivated in his own heart grew wildly and without abandon.    
  
"You okay?" Shadow said, nine months of settling having stolen the bags from his eyes. His flowerpot, still the same pot, still the same flower, sat beside him, as vibrant as it had been three-quarters of a year ago.   
  
Infinite blinked back the tear in his eye and the lump in his throat. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine now. I love you, Shadow."    
  
"I love you, Infinite."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YOU got through ACT 1!
> 
> Anyway, this is the end of the first act of this fanfic - I wrote all of it before posting. I guess if it ends here, it ends here, but I'm planning to write more. Far more. :)
> 
> Leave a kudos, comment, whatever. I feed on your approval, and synthesize it into the primordial soup that fills my hollowed-out husk and permeates my withered bones.

**Author's Note:**

> Posting chapters 2-4 on Thursdays, weekly.


End file.
